Hacker Cinema
The Daily Show
1996 · TV series · 31 seasons
Created by Madeleine Smithberg, Lizz Winstead
The World's Fakest News Team tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and pop culture.
19 positive12 negative1 mixed40 neutralfrom 72 commenters
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77 comments on Hacker News
> Colbert highlighted [truthiness] on the very first episode of his Colbert Report, a spinoff of The Daily Show which featured him as a blown-up parody of TV pundits like original Fox News Channel star Bill O'Reilly — championing the idea of believing something because it feels true, regardless of the facts. "I don't trust books," he says in a segment from that first show. "They're all facts and no heart."
> ...
> "Stephen Colbert has shown, more so than anyone else of this modern era of late night, the power of sticking to the truth," says Roy Wood Jr., a former correspondent on The Daily Show and host of CNN's satire program, Have I Got News for You.
The problem is there isn't just one "truth" (at least in politics and many other things). Liberals like to believe that "truthiness" is just the other guys' problem, which is a pretty "truthy" belief itself.
One of the most dangerous and foolish beliefs is the one where you you believe your side has access to the truth and the other side is all lies.
> And while some critics have theorized that part of the slide in ratings among network TV late night shows might be attributed to the hosts' increasingly intense political stands, Carter disagrees. He says modern media consumers often operate in an information silo where online algorithms push content at them, which reinforces what they already believe – making it tough for anyone to craft comedy which speaks across a wide swath of consumers.
Colbert played a significant role in creating and maintaining those silos. He definitely wasn't an antidote in any sense. I watched him for several years, but eventually got tried of his show because I realized it wasn't really that funny, it was more a setup to get viewers to think "I too do not like that man, we are right and superior to those who disagree."
> technically true but ambiguous
which has been the backbone of satirical and scathing social and political commentary in the western world for 50 years at least.
The Daily Show, The -s30e102- 2025-09-18 Maria Ressa episode with Jon Stewart's monologue and interview went another way, "rolling over" completely into total Trump submission followed by drawing direct comparisons to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte popularist seizing of control of government.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Ressa
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Duterte
> It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
I think the problem with the “punching up/down” perspective of comedy is that power is relative so the same exact humor and joke can be both punching up and down at the exact same time. Consider the current political moment in the US. Right wing, conservative, religious groups have power currently, so your average Daily Show or SNL writer feels pretty justified that they’re “punching up” when they take their potshots at “god and country” types. And to an extent they are. But at the same time, your average “god and country” type that their humor is skewering is also a punch down because unlike the SNL or Daily Show writer, they don’t have a national TV show in which to broadcast their views. They are (if you believe the writers) uneducated, ignorant and duped into believing lies that the rich and powerful have sold them. But if that’s the case, then by definition they are not the powerful, and “punching” them must be “punching down” (or at least laterally). Is it right (or at least ok) to be skewering “god and country” types for the ridiculous things they do? Probably. But I don’t think it’s because it’s somehow “speaking truth to power” or “punching up”. It’s right and ok because they are ridiculous things and people are allowed to find ridiculous things funny and skewer them, regardless of the relative power disparities
> It's so hard to to believe in people or have a positive opinion of them when much of my interactions are negative. Or when people who embody the opposite of goodness are promoted and have status. It's like we live in a society in which mediocrity, borderline sociopathy, and meanness are rewarded.
Which I think is why the original article has an important idea. We need to be fans more and encourage that as a way of thinking. If mediocrity and borderline sociopathy are rewarded by society at large, it must mean that mediocrity and borderline sociopathy are rewarded by society in the small. And sure enough, take a look around (and look at pop culture over the last couple decades) and you'll see that's true:
* American "Kitchen Nightmares" took what was an often genuinely heartfelt show about struggling restaurants in its UK incarnation and turned it into a circus side show complete with jeering at the freaks.
* Reality competition shows thrive on marketing terrible performances and smug take downs by Simon Cowell and his various low rent knockoffs.
* The Daily Show / John Oliver thrives on the sort of smug "I'm better than these obvious idiots, and wink wink you are too because you watch me and we know we're very smart" behavior that ironically also powers the Glenn Beck / Rush Limbaugh contingent on the other side of the spectrum.
* Trump himself made his own reality TV show where the entire premise was just firing people for not being sufficiently subservient.
* And remember things like "The Weakest Link"?
We've built a culture over the years, that has turned large swaths of the internet from small communities of fans and enthusiasts to large communities of "take down" artists and drive by clap backs a la twitter. We promote criticism and boarderline sociopathy on a daily basis and hold it up as an ideal to strive for, and turn to "You just can't handle the truth" whenever someone calls it out. Is it any wonder then that the people that are rising to the top in a world that promotes crab bucket mentality are the biggest and meanest crabs?
But if we don't work to be different in the small. If we don't try in our day to day efforts even when it's extremely difficult to do so, to be kind, positive, and enthusiastic, where do we expect that behavior to come from in our leaders and the people we promote? If "harsh truth" people who "say what they want" and "don't care about your feels" are the sort of people we lift up at the bottom, why do we expect it to be any different the higher up we go?
You used to be able to watch every episode of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central website. They also made the close captions of each episode indexable by search engines so you could find an episode based on remembered fragments of what a guest or Jon might have said and it worked really well.
I remember finding clips I'd never seen requested by people on /r/DailyShow just based on their description but then at some point Google changed focus from finding stuff to answering questions and while the close captions were still in the source of the videos' pages, they weren't coming up on Google searches.
Now you can't even watch the episodes. It makes me sad, how much the internet has changed and continues to change but I guess change is inevitable.
There is a torrent of all the Jon episodes of The Daily Show and maybe the other things the article mentions are similarly archived by a handful of enthusiasts but I still think it's sad.
I want to say the Daily Show had an episode about someone calling the sheriffs on Bank of America, and them visiting a local branch to enforce a court judgment
My original youtube channel was basically just funneling split up episodes of Daily show & Colbert Report directly onto it. Would get about 100,000 views a day until they started cutting down.
third paragraph of the linked article
> Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
third paragraph of the article
> Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
Partially
>Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
And you're missing
>Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
Not according to the article: "Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+."
It's a real shame too because I might actually be tempted to at least burn a free trial of that service if they had The Colbert Report
I'm pretty sure it was Mondays episode of the Daily Show that covered this pretty well in the intro. There are a lot of different groups out there, but the rich and greedy group does seem to lock up a huge amount of resources and propaganda.
I can promise you Jon Stewart isn't interested.
I saw one of the first tapings of The Problem. In a Q&A before the show, Jon talked about how draining it was to record The Daily Show every day. Furthermore, he was frustrated by each episode's short shelf-life—for all the work they did, no one was interested after a few days.
For The Problem, Jon Stewart only recorded a handful of episodes each year, and he chose topics which (he hoped) would remain relevant for longer.
The new show was nothing like the old Daily Show. At least the couple of episodes that I saw of it.
I watched one episode at a friend’s house and Jon Stewart has taken a turn toward Andy Rooney. Those looking for him to reprise The Daily Show are understandably disappointed.
Honestly, I just loved him on the Daily Show. I watched an episode or two on Apple TV and it was terrible.
He's just an amazing comedian, but serious journalist. Not so much.
I loved the Daily Show, but I was sort of lukewarm in the new format (only watched a few of the early episodes). The panel discussions didn’t really seem to land, and I feel like they rarely do. The interviews were really good though.
When I saw The Problem was announced I had a feeling from the beginning this was not a match that was going to last. Apple TV produced shows have this common thread between them, a very Apple-y je ne sais quoi. Inoffensive, progressive, usually more optimistic than gritty. You can feel the top down production, and there is certainly nothing auteur on offer.
Jon has enough clout and self respect he doesn’t need to kowtow. Which is great for him. But either way, Apple gets what it wants because whatever he wanted to say about China will never be said (and I agree about some other comments that this isn’t about AI - I don’t see Apple taking such a hard editorial line there).
I do wonder what comes next for Jon. He has emerged back on the scene and I’m not sure I see him retreating back into retirement after such a short and anticlimactic stint.
What most viewers didn't realize is that what made Jon Stewart's Daily Show so great - was the huge A caliber writing staff & contributors behind it.
All who have gone onto bigger things, like:
- Stephen Colbert (has his own show now)
- Jon Oliver (has his own show now)
- Samatha Bee (has her own show now)
- Larry Wilmore (has his own show now)
- Steve Carell (movies/own show)
- Hasan Minhaj (who had his own show and probably the best "Daily Show" like spin off)
... and many more
The daily show was daily. There have been 10 episodes a year of the problem. If you saw 1/10 as much of the problem as the daily then it's outperforming in terms of buzz vs. air time.
I was a big fan of Stewart’s when he was hosting the Daily Show. I was extremely excited for this new show on Apple. In short, I feel I was the target market.
I watched a few episodes and couldn’t stomach them. His personality seems to have changed since the Daily Show and he just seems so much more self righteous and arrogant. I didn’t enjoy them, even though I am predisposed to be interested in the content.
I also don’t think this is limited to this show. I heard him as a guest on the Strike Force Five podcast and again he came across as just unbearable.
I think it's wack to bounce back and forth between "doing news" and "doing comedy".
It blurs the lines and honestly as terrifying as it sounds, some politically active, white collar, college educated, liberal people I know genuinely consume the majority of their news through these types of shows. The Daily Show, Patriot Act, Last Week Tonight, etc.
I constantly get told by these people, who openly admit to not reading local news and are blissfully unaware of things in their own neighborhood, that I should watch X episode of Y news comedy hour so that I can "understand" issue Z.
Sorry, but I'm literate and capable of reading, I don't need my news fed to me on a spoon while a comedian makes airplane noises.
Chappelle never did a news show, and Peter Jennings never had a stand up tour. I prefer it that way.
Seinfeld was funny, and his jokes never came across as being necessarily purely true.. but his whole shtick wasn't about being constantly persecuted for being a Jew or that say, Hispanics are mean to him.
Chappelle told outlandish stories, but even his stuff was never like "let me tell you a particular story about the FBI trying to entrap my family / being the subject of a terror incident / etc". His stories were always more low stakes.
My problem with Minhaj is the same problem I have with all newsinfotainment comedians. The mixing of news and entertainment on the left is no better than red meat bait on Fox News.
This stands for Stewart, Colbert, Klepper, Oliver, Noah, etc.
If you're whole shtick is about how (group X) is so bad and (here's a bunch of things that have happened to me), then you don't get to fallback on "hey I'm a comedian, this is just entertainment, of course its made up".
It's the same vibe as the people who love the orange man because even though he lies nonstop, he says things that appeal to how they feel.
Minhaj is not "just a comedian", he had a 40 episode news show - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act_with_Hasan_Minhaj after being on the Daily Show .. all in the same timeframe he was doing these comedy tours. He's even been called to testify before congress after one of his episodes did a deep dive on student loans.
The untrue jokes that he told about racism were long, deeply specific and extremely dire things like being the target of an FBI sting, anthrax hoax attack, or being physically attacked for his race. A few simple jokes about some words said or getting turned down for a date would be a smaller matter.
Late night TV shows as a format are way, way past their sell-by date. I think they'd do well to experiment with other formats and delivery channels, before they get canceled altogether.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2022/09/30/how-late-night-talk-ratings-cratered-during-trevor-noahs-daily-show-era/?sh=67e3816c6c15
>Noah’s premiere episode as The Daily Show host in September 2015 garnered 3.47 million viewers, directly on par with Jon Stewart’s final episode a month prior.
> That year, The Daily Show averaged 1.1 million viewers, lagging somewhat behind broadcast shows like NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (3.78 million), CBS’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (3.17 million) and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! (2.53 million), according to Variety.
https://archive.ph/7HBWK
Meantime, Joe Rogan averages 11 million listeners per episode:
https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-what-joe-rogan-s-viewership-numbers
I suspect Fresh Air (Terry Gross) also beats them all, although that number seems a little harder to get specifically:
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/audio-and-podcasting/
"Those are not comparable!" you say? Exactly. Rogan and Gross are people who have one guest at a time and actually talk to them. It's pretty clear that audiences are starting to prefer that.
I started watching German television on YouTube a couple years ago and had a very eerie feeling when I discovered the ZDF Heute Show and Harald Schmidt's show (modeled after the Daily Show and David Letterman, respectively). It might seem trite to point out a couple of television shows, but it was certainly a surprise to me. Do you think the similarity owes more to US involvement in post-war reconstruction or general globalization?
One of the things I like about the Heute Show is that the gags often point at some cultural thing I knew nothing about (in fact, I think it was one of those gags that led me to reading Stuwwelpeter in the first place). Similarly, I encountered something last week that prompted me to read Max und Moritz. So I assume these things still have cultural relevance, even if as a sort of short-hand, but I certainly see your point (edit: at least superficially).
I have terabytes of movies and series. I've spent like 1 hour in the past 12 months adding some stuff to my collection. HDD space is extremely cheap and keeping a local copy is such low effort that I don't see why I should get rid of my collection. Some of it is also so rare as to be impossible to find unless you're a member of some private sharing sites (try finding a complete archive of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show).
I've also lost terabytes of shows/movies before and wasn't affected by it at all. Shit happens. But I prefer having high quality copies immediately available. I've had a complete rip of the animated show "Hey, Arnold!" for like 3 years and only just started watching the whole thing now, and I'm thankful to my past self for giving me such convenient access to something I enjoyed so much as a kid.
Leave it to Australia to insure the corrupt get paid for getting covered & their feelings hurt. This country has such a bloodthirsty legal system with regard to hurt feelings & the rights to privacy for ultra-wealthy world-burning imperialist fatcats.
Personally the world is so bad & there's so many pieces of shit out there that I think humor is the only possible convcievable way to view things. The Daily Show certainly helped the world tune in to understand & grasp what was going on, to see it with enough slant & mirth & ridiculousness to be worth watching, & not just the saddest sorriest tragedy.
Reasons (TV/Movie) piracy is better than any paid service:
* All in one place/App/UI. Be it Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/Kodi/etc, you only have 1 app UI/UX to deal with. No more wondering "What network was that on?", "Wait, it's on 2 services but which one has my watched status?", "What does clicking forward/back do in this App?", "How do I turn on subtitles?", etc
* Local playback. You never have to wait on your internet or deal with lower quality if something goes amiss.
* More features. Ability to download a show/movie to your iPad for travel (Yes, this has improved on the streaming platforms but is not always easy or ubiquitous)
* Access forever. If you hoard at least. You cannot find certain shows online anymore. The Daily Show or The Colbert Report are good examples. I know some people might find watching old episodes of daily news shows to be odd but I find them interesting and still humorous. All you can find is scattered clips online. Also shows that were never super popular can be impossible to find on streaming and often impossible to buy.
* No Ads. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
* Tech/Job improvement Aspect. This is less about piracy directly and the skills you are forced to learn to maintain an *arr+plex+UnRaid/FreeNAS/Debian/etc box.
You are correct that the cost is not cheap, I've probably sunk $5K+ into my servers but I find the process to be both informative and enjoyable.
Lastly, I would happily pay $100-150+ a month for a service that gave me all of the above (aside from server management experience). 1 App, offline/local caching, no ads, all content. But it will never happen. Netflix gave us some golden years where they had almost everything someone would want but then the content providers started to pull back their content to their own "platforms" and now it's a mess. Even things like Amazon Channels, Apple TV (no, not the device, no, not the service, the app :rolleyes:), or now even Plex (with their newest release) that attempt to serve as directory that can either play the content directly or bounce you directly into the app to play are a far cry from what you get from an only-Plex (or insert other media server) setup.
I found lot about CAHOOTS from the Daily Show a few weeks ago. Here's the episode: https://youtu.be/D3Z6uEfpTog.
Fair point; sure, there you go. (in no particular order, I'm probably forgetting many greats)
### Tech:
- Lex Fridman — AI podcast: hall of fame of AI speaks there, and I really like Lex. https://www.youtube.com/user/lexfridman
- EngineerMan is one of the best teachers out there for the "get it done" simple PoC stuff — lots of cool tricks, crystal clear explaining. Mostly devops / system. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrUL8K81R4VBzm-KOYwrcxQ
- lots of conferences (all talks) get posted, so I tend to watch enough of those (not the 'big' marketing stuff like Google, more specific tech or domain driven like some language, paradigm, product...). It's my way to keep in touch with many of these spaces without spending more than a few hours per year: from the mouth of the lion (main keynote is usually 'enough' for the 20% effort). E.g. I heard Rob Pike maybe 6 months ago, so I know where Go is at on its ~10-year journey so far. It's also a great way to discover in-depth features when you're digging into a topic (again ideally, 1 as-fast-as-possible talk from developer themselves). You generally have to seek the relevant channel, e.g. for Pycon 2019 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxs2IIVXaEHHA4BtTiWZ2mQ/videos
- Coding Tech posts a lot of talks from all around the programming scene, and the curation is surprisingly good (some talks are really awesome, maybe half is quite decent). https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtxCXg-UvSnTKPOzLH4wJaQ
- Level1Techs (and Level1Linux): Wendell is a nerd like us, but he's smarter and funnier at it than most. I love this guy. Real, real good perspectives. https://www.youtube.com/user/teksyndicate
- ServeTheHomeVideo: from the same website, a reference for all things DIY server (and frankly IT in most SMBs). https://www.youtube.com/user/ServeTheHomeVideo
- Gary Explains: he's just the best for all things mobile, ARM, etc. (very high-level, but he knows programming and sysadmin so he's not shallow like most popular YouTubers with those topics) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRjSO-juFtngAeJGJRMdIZw
### Science, math:
- Isaac Arthur, possibly the best "aggregator" of hard sci-fi concepts, I've binged so much on his channel. Love the spirit. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
- Anton Petrov is the best astrophysics and related science news I've ever had (10 minutes a day is enough for me). Almost real-time with papers, and plenty of skill to explain the stuff simply. A really "wonderful person"! https://www.youtube.com/user/whatdamath
- Dr. Becky, same as Anton Petrov, cool astrophysics. She studies galaxies! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYNbYGl89UUowy8oXkipC-Q
- the whole "-phile" suite — Computerphile, Numberphile, etc. Selectively, when I like the topic. https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile
- PBS Space Time, probably the best layman content to understand theories in astrophysics, and Matt is awesome. He studies black holes! (also consider PBS Infinite series which is inactive now). https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g
- 3Blue1Brown, obviously, selectively for topics I need/like. (but I tend to binge his stuff because it's so good)
- Channels like MIT OpenCourseWare for lectures. https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
- TED is not what it used to be, but worth watching a few sometimes (TEDx has disappointed me too many times with clickbait (waste of my time), so I really avoid it now unless someone human recommends a video).
- Talks at Google has some interesting stuff sometimes. https://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks
- People like Socratica (math, Python), Andrew Dotson (physics), Zach Star (math), Kai Hendry (Linux, AWS..), "Machine Learning with Phil". It fluctuates in time as I discover new people or as their content becomes boring to me.
- Special mention for Robert Miles, AI safety researcher at Cambridge iirc. It's mostly abstract math / philo stuff (that funny boundary between the two), and really mind-blowing at times (I mean literally, not the smoking gun, just your mind melting down from thinking through the problem). I'm in awe at the talent of this young dude, so fluent with such topics. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLB7AzTwc6VFZrBsO2ucBMg
### More general stuff:
- Stefan Mischook has the best freelancer (and beginner developer) advice you can find, imho. He's a legit down-to-earth guy with a knack for telling it like it is in simple words. https://www.youtube.com/user/killerphp
- Joe Rogan, because why not! Selectively (mostly philo/sci guests and maybe 1% of his MMA-related stuff). https://www.youtube.com/user/PowerfulJRE
- these days I'd get informed on the coronavirus from doctors directly, e.g MedCram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quDYb_x54DM
### Some music I like, examples of channels concepts:
- COLORS (really artful uncut live video recordings from up and going artists) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Qw1dzXDBAZPwS7zm37g8g
- InYourChill (background) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCncxHd8o_VhhHAJ7QqB5azg
I also watch a few musicians who do impressive stuff, but that's more fleeting, no real sticker here for me. Just impressed at all the tatent out there!
### For fun:
- The Daily Show with Trevor Noah https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA
- Last Week Tonight with John Oliver https://www.youtube.com/user/LastWeekTonight
_____
My MO is simple: I only look at my "subscription" page (ignore the 'home' page with suggestions most of the time). Occasionally, I'll look at the right pane suggestions and try things, but I'm quick to close the tab if it doesn't feel genuine.
Also, lots of backtracking. When I discover a channel that's great, I'll just spend months going through the catalog...
Yeah, I think it was an episode of The Daily Show where they bought a whole tranche of medical debt and forgave it.
That's incorrect, at the Daily Show they have a large fact checking team because they want their jokes to be based in fact. The Daily Show has also done apologies and retractions when they were incorrect. It is a comedy show but they are working hard to be correct, there's a great episode of NPR's Fresh Air where they speak with a Daily Show producer about exactly this issue.
Edit: I have heard Stewart say "we're not the news" in response to questions like "Do you feel a responsibility to cover every important issue?" where "we're not the news" means they only cover issues they can make funny (an example of something perhaps too sad to make funny is the Flint water crisis)
> At the end of the day it's a comedy show not a news show and his job is to make people laugh
He and Jon Stewart keep (kept in the case of Jon) using this excuse when they get things wrong, but when they get things right they take all the glory they can get. The show(s) have to have some sort of accountability.
For example Couric was just ripped for adding 6 seconds of dead air on a documentary....but that's literally what The Daily Show had been doing for years, making people look like idiots (so it fits their segment narrative). That's all good fun until you realize young people think people like Stewart and Oliver are trustworthy news sources.
I like what they do in many cases, but I despise this excuse that it's "just" a comedy show. Maybe NBC nightly news should just add an in-studio audience that laughs and suddenly they can get away with every screw up.
What is sold under the name of Indian curry in the UK does not even remotely resemble what is cooked in Indian homes.
Indian-born cookbook writer Madhur Jaffrey[1] has been railing against the poor standards of Indian food in the UK since the 1950s when she was a student in London.[2] In 2010, she wrote a cookbook called Easy Curry about which one reviewer wrote, "If you have the local curry house menu by your phone, consider replacing it with a copy of this book."[3]
A year earlier, she had teamed up with Aasif Mandvi[4] to bring out the movie Today's Special[5] that portrays Mandvi as a French sous chef who has to take over his father's struggling Indian restaurant in Queens, New York.[6] Mandvi's character has to deal with all the factors against the family tandoori joint: the unhygienic prep, the unhealthy pool of oil in which the dishes are served, the cheap decor, the declining customer base, etc.
So yeah, the young blood is getting the message.
(American television viewers may remember Mandvi from his stint as correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.[7])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhur_Jaffrey
[2] Very muddy to very modern http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f603c2e-70d2-11d9-b572-00000e2511c8.html
[3] Curry Easy by Madhur Jaffrey http://www.amazon.co.uk/Curry-Easy-Madhur-Jaffrey/dp/009192314X
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aasif_Mandvi
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today%27s_Special_%28film%29
[6] Aasif Mandvi and Madhur Jaffrey on Their Film Today's Special http://www.eater.com/2010/4/28/6735605/aasif-mandvi-and-madhur-jaffrey-on-their-film-todays-special
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Show
Reminds me of the episode of daily show where the overseas call center outsourced to Americans who had to fake a foreign accent.
And I think you are standing close to a clump of trees labeled "internet" and mistaking that grove for the entire forest.
FWIW, I'm about as old as ARPANET. I also have a special interest in information systems of the 1950s and 1960s - the era of the "information explosion" - and have been reading many papers and essays from that era.
What you say about the Gray Lady is true, but only a part of history. I'm also old enough to remember Walter Cronkite's "And that's the way it is" signoff. You might remember that Johnson is said to have said "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America" after Cronkite's "Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?" editorial.
"The New York Times (primarily) really replaced the Catholic Church as the cultural maypole."
That is nonsense. For one, it's American-centric, as "The Times" of London (and source for Times New Roman) used to be much more important on the world stage than the NYT. The NYT both started later than The Times, and derived its name from the London paper. Remember, it was The Times (of London) which first reported on Krakatoa, which was the first major natural disaster to appear after the world-wide telegraph was put into place. Not the NYT. And London was the world center in telecommunications.
For another, the US was anti-papist long before the NYT started. The Catholic church was not a 'cultural maypole' in the US. (And how delicious to use the pagan maypole to describe the Catholic church! But do you mean 'touchstone'?) We were still wary about Catholicism in 1960, which is why Kennedy declared "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and the Church does not speak for me."
Early American anti-papist leanings come from its British cultural heritage. Great Britain was institutionally anti-Catholic since the Act of Supremacy of 1534 and restrictions against Roman Catholics were still in place until full Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
It's easy to prove me wrong. The NYT started in 1851. Can you demonstrate how the Catholic church was an important 'cultural maypole' in the US before then?
> I think we agree TV was a major technological creation and certainly changed society but it did not challenge the newspapers for social power and influence
Yet there are articles like "The Kennedy-Nixon Debates: When TV Changed the Game" describing the growing social power and influence of televion http://time.com/26035/kennedy-nixon-debates-1960-the-tv-landmark-that-changed-the-game/ . And the modern day Hearst is Rupert Murdoch, who started in newspapers (and bought 'The Times' and 'The Wall Street Journal') and also several TV networks, including Fox News, which he uses to help influence US policy.
It's hard to argue that Fox News does not have significant social power in the US.
And the major cultural development, from sports to political debates to "Game of Thrones" to satirical news sources likes "The Daily Show", are still structured as TV shows, even when they are 'broadcast' over the internet.
Similarly, Comedy Central elimnated any mention of Craig Kilborn in relation to the Daily Show on their website. They don't host any back episodes with him, and relatively few are found elsewhere (recording and posting shows on the Internet/P2P was not as popular at the turn of the century).
Searching again, they do have a bio for him [0], but it has no mention of his role on the show, and they don't even give him the curtesy of being listed as an alumn.
0 - http://thedailyshow.cc.com/news-team/craig-kilborn
Daily Show/Colbert are so incredibly dumbed down and mainstream though. And South Park has the annoying tendency to reiterate its point throughout the episode.
John Oliver's show has honestly taken things to a far better level, dealing with real issues in approachable ways.
The Daily Show is just cluttered with inside gossip about crappy news TV which I don't give a shit about either. Basically, the Daily Show has had a handful of great segments but is mostly straw-man stuff that's kinda nice, kinda meh. Colbert is fantastic but rarely really took on real issues — although his Super PAC thing was superb.
Fact is, John Oliver's show is totally amazingly great. The best of its kind, hands down (says me, someone who basically avoids TV shows and actually has only a modest sense of what's out there).
I think you'd need CasperJS when you need to perform browser actions (login, click on a particular button, fill a form etc). But if you just want to scrape content (eg episode urls of The Daily Show from Hulu), then ScraperJS should be enough (and faster?)
It was the Daily Show
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/extended-interviews/o7grtj/exclusive-michael-lewis-extended-interview
As I understand it, that link is only good in the US. So for everyone else, that is the extended interview of the April 1 episode. I'm sure it can be found somewhere.
Oh... you must watch The Daily Show, with all of that political prowess... and stuff.
The quote does sound odd, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were an embellishment or paraphrase.
But you know, the New York Times has been running stories on Bitcoin for a couple of years now. It's been all over CNN and other mainstream news sources. The New Yorker printed a feature about Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2011 [1]. Popular TV shows like The Daily Show have talked about Bitcoin [2]. Newspapers are printing political cartoons about it [3]. The Washington Post has three Bitcoin headlines on the front page of its web site this morning! (One about MtGOX, one on Nakamoto, and one on Autumn Radtke.)
Anyone who has read, watched, or listened to news in the past year has a good chance of knowing some stuff about Bitcoin, just like they know that Steve Jobs died and what Google Glass is. The name Satoshi Nakamoto is reasonably memorable and distinctive. And law enforcement officers in particular might have some professional curiosity about the Bitcoin economy.
[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_davis
[2]: http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2014/02/daily-show-helps-you-figure-out-whole-bitcoin-business/358667/
[3]: http://buttcoin.org/bitcoin-hardy-har-har
> why we do not see the "us vs. them " in NY...
You must not be watching NYC politics. Watch all of yesterday's episode of The Daily Show [1] with Mayor DeBlasio. Don't worry, you won't need to read into any subtext, it's the whole focus of the episode.
[1] Free online: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/mon-february-3-2014-bill-de-blasio
Reminds me of the episode of the Daily Show where Neil deGrasse Tyson informs Jon Stewart that the Earth is spinning in the wrong direction in the opening credits of the show
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy3PgFhIpyM#t=0m56s
Reminds me of the Daily Show's incisive documentary about Sweden. http://www.videogum.com/65751/the_daily_show_visits_robyns_b/tv/late-night/
I remember watching the South Park film from the 1990s with Danish subtitles, and realised the subtitles' swear words were far worse than the English ones.
Stranger still, they air The Daily Show here uncensored.
There is, somewhere on the internet, a Daily Show episode where even they respect the law and don't use the footage.
I imagine they would have to sign a contract to get the footage and would be bound by the draconian idea that men and women sitting two swords length apart across a chamber guarded by men in tights are not to be laughed at.
I think the main difference in content between Netflix and Hulu Plus is that Hulu Plus gives you access to episodes from the current season (and often the full season beyond the most recent ones available on regular Hulu.)
Also, the Daily Show isn't a great example since episodes deal with news so I can't imagine many people buying up old episodes. (And you can get free episodes going back a month at http://www.thedailyshow.com/)
Edit: The Daily Show is actually an okay example now that I realize that you wanted Hulu+ for the non-desktop experience rather than for back episodes.
Well, it appears that episodes are no longer visible through thedailyshow website. But... http://www.hulu.com/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart Seems to work fine.
"Piracy has put the impetus on media companies to more quickly strike deals to make television and movies available on the Web legitimately. In 2007, Erik Flannigan, now the executive vice president of digital media at Viacom Entertainment Group, pulled up the Google search page on a giant screen at Viacom’s Times Square headquarters. He typed in “South Park” and took senior executives on a tour of Web sites offering pirated episodes.
Today, Comedy Central makes every episode of “South Park,” “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” available free online. The efforts, Mr. Flannigan said, put a big dent in piracy. As for the television industry as a whole, Mr. Flannigan said: “You might not like the windows, or that shows go up and come down, but it’s a far cry from where we were.”
Still, Comedy Central shows do not make billions in syndication or in DVD sales like some TV series. The industry has been reluctant to make available shows like CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory,” which sold for $2 million an episode to Time Warner’s TBS and Fox. That makes piracy a tempting option.
“If they don’t make content available where consumers are, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor and the head of the SV Angel investment fund."
CBS' concerns stem from the fact that if the web delegitimizes a television channel's status as the go-to source for viewers, then the whole process of the concentrated industry's livelihood, one which they have established as essential to stay afloat, let alone profit, is irreparably diminished.
If advertisers do not think the money they paid in the past is what they need to pay TBS now, given other advert opportunities, they will to want pay less for commercials, which support TBS' model, and would bungle up their plans. (TV Industry would go off of Nielsen ratings, which were strong estimated guesses of # of ppl/demos tuning into particular programming; this information provided Advertisers an idea of where they should their energies and money, for maximum appeal.)
TBS will want to pay less because they won't rake in as much from commercials, pissing CBS off since they rely upon $2 mil/episode syndication deals of their most popular properties to subsist and survive.
And CBS won't want to spend as much on their properties (production budgets, salaries, etc) because they will be uncertain if it will even pay off. We are past the days of Must-See TV Thursday and 30 Million Viewers for 30 mins of Friends. Sorry Burbank, they are not coming back. ---- At least Comedy Central recognizes their new competition in distribution and knew to bite the proverbial bullet and stream for free what is going to be out there for free, no matter what. Because of that, they build up brand loyalty (less and less of an influence on TV, more and more of one online) and can make money advertising -- centralizing properties, distributing, and payoff -- within the company. Establish an optional low-cost subscription fee for complete access to their library, and enough people will pay for it to justify its creation, too!
I am 21 years old, and hardly anyone my age watches TV. They WILL subscribe to Hulu, and they WILL subscribe to Netflix -- but look at the volume of content, and the amount of control the viewer has with those services! The television is a box of content that asks for passivity from the viewer, especially in choice availability. That does NOT work in The Game anymore.
Those that look to "Remember When" and long for systems of the past are individuals who are losing to progress, because they did not -- or COULD not, in much of Hollywood's case -- look past their at-present business models for more innovative means necessary for industry survival.
Now is the opportunity for independents all over to seize the unprecedented access to the consumer they now have and make a living doing it.
People do not care if Paramount Pictures made a movie or Uncle Regis' buddy two towns over did -- they just need it offered to them, they want it when they want it, and above all, they want it to be worth their time. Anybody can do that, and anybody can make money off of that.
--stepping off the soapbox--
Same here. One of the core reasons that I still download the Daily Show with BitTorrent, even though the episodes are freely available on the Daily Show's web site, is that I've gotten used to getting Jon Stewart's jokes at 1.25x speed, and the web site doesn't let me speed it up.
Megaupload and FileSonic were my source of The Daily Show episodes. I don't live in the US, there isn't any other way I could watch it. It used to be on cable (sony) but not anymore. I used to have a SSL tunnel and a plus account on Hulu to watch some series, but then I got tired of maintaining a VPS.
I don't go to theaters. I think it's a stupid waste of time for a bad quality experience. I watch tons of movies on pay-per-view, but the list I can choose from is 5-10 movies long. Netflix here is also limited to a few titles. I record a lot of series, but some of them are incomplete or translated.
There is no other option to me. I need to be a pirate if I want that content. I tried way too many times to get MPAA to accept my money, but they don't want it.
Good thing is that I've been discovering some really cool stuff made in Europe (specially France) (and they accept my money for their content!!!).
EDIT:
I also need to make Itunes believe I'm in the US in order to buy the stuff I want. I can't use my credit card, so I buy gift cards using some "illegal" websites. This is pathetic.
Why does H'Wood have to be killed? All they have to do is change their business models a bit.
I've been wondering if an apps-like model would work for TV shows and movies. EG, if you like The Daily Show, you have a Daily Show app, instead of having to subscribe to a whole slew of channels you'll never watch. Or for sports: Like Formula 1? Get the F1 app. Need some news? Daily News app, done. After you've got all your apps, you can mix & match, set whether you want to be interrupted (watching the daily show and some F1 qualifying is starting, switch to that app y/n?), heck, even set the number of ads and length of ads (longer ads means less ads, and vice-versa).
Similar for movies. There, you could split up the apps either by genre, franchise, favorite star. Like Leo DiCaprio movies? D/L the Leo app. Like the Batman franchise? Get the app, and have everything from the 60s TV show (yes, I know, mixing TV and movies, here) to The Dark Knight.
The Daily Show and the Colbert Report somehow manage to get all my friends to watch every single night, commercials and all.
That's because they type www.thedailyshow.com and then they can instantly watch the entire week of episodes for free, with Comedy-Central's advertising revenue still intact. The way forward seems pretty clear to me.
Depending on the documentary, you can often include segments of news footage for the purpose of commentary, especially if your commentary is on the news commentary itself (e.g. criticizing CNN's coverage). That's one of the main purposes of fair use, since otherwise CNN would be able to veto critical commentary of its broadcasts.
See, e.g., the Daily Show, which does not license the news footage it shows.
Top Gear is an entertainment show with cars as the backdrop. Just like Daily show is a comedy show with political clips.
If you want a car review show, take a look at Motor Week.
I think these claims of "faking" are ridiculous when you have episodes where cast members "die" (top gear apocalypse), and characteristics are emphasized for comedic effect (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8).
This article claims because of Top Gear's antics, the public is being misinformed about the benefits of electric cars. It completely misses the point that 1. it is not a car review show, and 2. there is a major poetical component of the show that celebrates automotive history. They like exciting cars and bash boring uninspired ones (except if its remarkably boring). Their reviews emphasize a car's essence, not necessarily a list of facts.
I think this view is coming from a place that has a vested interest in electric cars, and not anyone who really watches the show. Otherwise they'd be attacking all the claims ("Some Say") made about The Stig.
The public clearly saw the same ham-handed manipulation of the press during the whole Valerie Plame debacle. The same sort of thing is made obvious in most of the Daily Show episodes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media
You don't have to read the whole thing. Just find the parts where they do empirical comparisons. It becomes very obvious that the western press is a propaganda machine -- just the slick "free market" version.
It was The Daily Show and The Colbert Report On Ice; a traveling live version of the television show.
This is probably my last response to you and I'm trying to say this without coming across as mean.
First off, there are no serious claims anywhere that TDS misrepresents itself when filming interviews. People here have asked for citations of your claim several times and you've failed to respond. Please stop regurgitating nonsense. This isn't the place for it.
While I enjoy your willingness to engage on some level, and not immediately degenerate every posting into a Godwin's law violation, you really have a terrible awful lot to learn. I don't mean this in a "if only you knew more about the brilliance of leftist politics, the truth would become obvious" sort of way. I mean this completely apolitically. You actually seem to be completely unawares what political parody, satire, irony, sarcasm and comedy is, its history and how it works. The audience of TDS does know. You are clearly not the audience.
The Daily show has been broadcast in the U.S. for almost 15 years on a channel exclusively devoted to broadcasting comedy programming, it's one of the most popular and well known shows in America. It's commonly rebroadcast on the Internet, on other stations and other programs. Its host, Stewart appears often on popular competing and opposing shows. It's commonly derided by right-leaning talkshow hosts, news programs and commentary shows. It makes no claims to be a news show, unbiased or otherwise. Stewart himself has said on many occasions that he and the show are clearly left-leaning but make a concerted effort to make fun of all-sides. Despite their admitted left-lean, the show has gained a strong reputation among the right-leaning people as a place where they can have a fair conversation during the table-talk guest interviews. Every episode is available online, and youtube is practically clogged with TDS clips. It's won dozens upon dozens of major awards (I don't mean this as a point of legitimacy, but as a point of notoriety). It's well known in most English speaking countries and many non-English speaking countries. They even put this up at the beginning of every episode: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f9/TDSglobal.png. In other words, what it is, and what it serves is well and widely known by anybody who has ever watched it.
Stewart himself says of how they target the show, "Our show would not be valuable to people who didn't understand the news because it wouldn't make sense," he argues. "We make assumptions about your level of knowledge that... if we were your only source of news, you would just watch our show and think, 'I don't know what's happening.'"
Again, I'm not saying this to be mean spirited, but you are clearly not somebody who they are targeting for their audience. In order to understand the show, you have to be well informed about current events, people in the news, politics, who the major players are, and understand parody, satire, sarcasm, irony and comedy. You clearly don't fit into this mold and that's okay. I don't get the work of Mark Rothko, I'm clearly not the intended audience of his work either.
Your objection is that TDS is not an apolitical objective news program doesn't make any sense because you don't know and understand the things you have to know and understand to "get it", it's like complaining that my car is not a helicopter.
Did you seriously just compare The Daily Show to Nazi Propaganda films?
(And there's no way I accept that it's a socialist hate campaign... that's straight out of Glenn Beck rhetoric land).
"Nope. Journalism isn’t doing fine. The majority of papers that do good investigative journalism have serious financial problems."
I did say you were looking in the wrong places. You said you weren't in the US, so I wouldn't expect you to know about what local and regional papers do. Journalism does exist, but you have to go to the locals to find it. By narrowing their focus, they're able to limit the costs.
They have one beat, and it's usually in their own neighborhood.
"Here is a good example: Daily Show of 13 July 2010. A large part deals with racism in South Africa and race relations. The author paints a completely wrong picture (of an incredibly difficult and nuanced subject – which involves language and culture rights, economical aspects and poverty, land ownership, illegal immigration, and xenophobia, black economic empowerment, etc…)."
I can't find any reference to that day's episode or the clip you mention. Can you be more specific by providing a link?
And the interviews are gold.
Um, what? Daily Show interviews tend to be awful. Most of them are random book authors hawking their latest book or actors hawking their latest film. Stewart often acts like an attention-starved puppy. When he decides to actually confront his guests, things often go badly because he's so unprepared. Did you see his interview with John Yoo? Yoo wiped the floor with him. Did you see how he sucked up to Musharraf? I mean, when you have a dictator on your show, you can at least ask one or two challenging questions.
I watched both shows last night on their websites instead of Hulu, which I had become accustomed to.
One thing I noticed immediately: Way more commercials. Where Hulu only had a single commercial per break, Comedy Central had about 3 per break. Another thing was that the commercials they played were more "real." I don't know what experience others have had on Hulu, but it seemed a huge percentage of their commercials were repeats of the same one or two - and often they were a PSA-type of thing. I always found that strange as they only showed one commercial per break and, by all accounts, it was a ludicrously cheap one. They couldn't have been making nearly as much per show as Comedy Central is going to be making now if they can keep all those slots sold. The additional commercials were annoying, but not the end of the world.
It seems that Comedy Central's player is one of those that degrades quality when the connection gets slow whereas Hulu would just stop and buffer. After only watching two shows it's hard to know how well it'll work in general, but it didn't stop and buffer once last night. I often had much more frustrating experiences with Hulu on account of the sometimes frequent buffering pauses. (Mediacom is not the world's best ISP...)
The primary downside here is that I've been using Hulu Desktop as my television provider for a couple months now. After ABC moved Castle to Hulu, I lost all reason to play the website shuffle when trying to watch a show and (aside from the buffering) it had become a very nice self-contained experience. Now that The Daily Show and Colbert are off the network, I'm back to manually switching players which is certainly a hassle.
I'd personally rather have an iTunes-style downloaded media service for television than streaming. It'd be far more reliable. I don't care if the files auto-expire after a number of days of not watching an episode or if I don't "own" the copy. I just hate the unreliable streaming and I also hate messing around with all the players. I think Apple's in a great position to offer something like this (tie TV show downloads with their rental infrastructure, perhaps, and then offer up all TV as a subscription). I longly await for such a solution to appear.
I've gone my entire life without TV, at least on a regular basis; I've visited friends with TVs, had roommates with TVs, etc, but never have I or my immediately family owned one, and even my roommates with TVs didn't watch much.
I resented it a bit when I was a kid, since my friends would talk about shows they watched that I couldn't. By the time I hit my teens I had realized what a waste of time it is, though, and I haven't wanted one since.
I occasionally watch a show or clips online, usually when my girlfriend wants to; there are a few shows that she likes. I do watch movies. I will also occasionally watch the Daily Show or something similar online.
Of course, as time wasting and mind-dulling as a lot of TV is, I find that I waste as much or more on the internet, so I'm not sure it's a net positive. The problem is, I can almost always find content that interests me on the internet, that is even plausibly useful, so it's hard to get myself away from it. The social aspect of posting to the internet and getting comments, feedback, upvotes, and the like also helps to suck me in.
On the whole, I think a lot of the reason I don't like much of TV is the ads and the mass-market homogenization. Some niche content appeals to me, so I tend to get a lot more out of internet videos that would never be popular enough to be on TV (people swapping juggling videos online, small foreign productions that will likely never make it to the US like the IT Crowd, stuff like that). As TV and the internet converges, with more channels added, premium channels that are free of ads, and so on, it might be that more of the "TV" content will appeal to me, but for now, I just don't have much interest in a lot of the content that is out there.
People like to claim that TV is only full of crap. This is grade A, Microsoft-FUD-level, Bullshit.
Like anything, sure, most of it is crap. Just like if you went to a bookstore and picked up 10 random fantasy novels. You might conclude that they're all just cookie cutter pablum - most are - but then you miss out on George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, LeGuin's Earthsea, and other truly excellent works of fiction.
But like anything, it takes some investment to tell the good from the bad. If you just watch Jon & Kate Plus 8, Entertainment Tonight, and According to Jim, yeah, you're better off without the TV altogether. But I claim that there's more good TV being made now than at any time in history, particularly for niche markets.
Here's some of my recommendations: Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, Supernatural, Dollhouse, The Office, 30 Rock, Lost, The Simpsons (not as great as it was, but still fun), The Daily Show/Colbert Report, Mad Men... and more, there's just a ton of really high quality work being done.
If your argument is that instead, you watch things online/through netflix, that makes sense. If I didn't enjoy live sports sometimes, I'd consider doing the same.
Not everyone has to have a hobby of watching television, or movies, or reading for that matter, but the opinion that it's all crap is extremely ill-informed and snobbish, and I strongly encourage it to be dropped as something that makes you sound actively stupid when you say it. It's an anti-pattern.
Not to nitpick, but they said 6 cents per viewer per ad on Hulu, so if there are 4 ads per episode you would have to watch 40 episodes a month (1.3 shows per day) to get to $10 a month. Not exactly 10 shows a day. I could break that by just watching the Daily Show everyday and catching 1 major show a season.
tvrss.net is an RSS for eztv.it For the Daily Show in particular I usually just watch on Hulu. The eztv link is http://eztv.it/shows/1/daily-show-the/, and the March 2nd episode looks like it was posted about an hour after the east-coast showing.
This is many years premature. It may come to pass, but is nowhere near that now. TV is still by far the most common way of watching television shows (and watching television shows is still the most common way of wasting time) and overall viewership is increasing every year. This trend doesn't seem to be changing for a few reasons.
1) TV screens are much bigger and cheaper. They don't need the resolution a monitor does. Watching on a small screen is something you're happy to be able to do on a plane, but would never want to do on a day to day basis.
2) Bandwidth is still not there, especially for HDTV, and progress seems to be stalled. I still have pretty much the same connection for the same price that I did 5 years ago, and I'll likely still have it in 5 years from now. Mark Cuban talks about this a lot. Fiber to the premises may solve this one soon for some subset of the country, but by no means everyone.
3) Live television is nearly non-existent online. It can't handle it. The bandwidth to stream the Superbowl to everyone who wants it doesn't exist. Sports are a huge part of the TV viewing audience.
4) Many people like to watch shows as soon as they're released. The internet is terrible for this. I personally download mine, but I do so knowing that I'm always going to be watching the Daily Show from 2 days ago. If I were a TV addict (i.e. normal American) that would be unacceptable.
5) Content quality is better than ever. Single camera sitcoms, pay channel dramas, reality tv (if you're into that). Almost everyone agrees this is a golden era of television.
If you really think that more people are watching TV on a computer than on a good old-fashioned TV, you need to come down from your Silicon Valley mountain for a while.
They're removing it because the people that created the TV show want it removed. Those people are the ones with rights to the content.
They also remove The Daily Show after two weeks, because Comedy Central wants to archive it on their own show. They have that right as content owners.
So I get that you don't like that, but it's their right, and the fact is that Hulu's so good because they work well with others.
Not all that surprising if you think about it, a lot of people assume eyeballs = money, but the quality of the eyeballs is more important than the quantity. What are you going to sell to a bunch of kids watching videos of backyard wrestling? Hulu has quality TV shows, which attract a better audience. Considering some of the biggest show on Hulu are SNL, the Daily Show, Colbert, etc the audience has a pretty well educated lean.
This is Facebook's underlying problem. All the network effects in the world just aren't as valuable as Facebook would like you to believe when the site is nearly all broke college students wasting time.
I'm that guy too. I hate TV.
Except heroes and house. Ohhh. The daily show. Colbert Report. Gotta catch south park and sarah silverman. Six feet under was pretty good, too...
Other then that TV sucks. I watch TV shows, but have no TV. The trick is to download your tv from the internet so you can dodge the ads concentrated power scientifically calibrate to manipulate you, and still get a dose of culture and electronic sedation.
The first thing that came to my head reading this was "Uh, since last year you could go to the Comedy Central website and watch every Daily Show episode ever."
I occasionally watch The Daily Show because I like being able to visually see the stuff I read about online. I also watch DVDs on my laptop, and occasionally box sets of TV shows.
If I don't get enough work done though for more than a day or two I start to feel physically unwell, and watching TV and playing videogames beyond a minimal amount triggers the same feeling.
Only show that I watch on actual TV is The Daily Show. Sometimes when I'm bored I watch lectures/talks/documentaries on the web.
www.ted.com has good short talks (10-20 mins) that can be good to watch when taking a break, or eating, etc.
"Internet users don't want to watch TV shows online" != the truth.
Back in the dawn of Youtube I used to watch all The Daily Show I could fit into my over-sized head. I still love watching old episodes of Hockey Night in Canada and I have bookmarked a non youtube site that let's me watch South Park. I can't count HOW many times in University people would download, myself possibly included, episodes of Lost, Family Guy, America's Next Top model.
I'd say TV shows online are BETTER than on regular TV because you can watch them when you want. Hence the amazing popularity of TIVO I would assume since I don't have that service.
1) Facebook is useful to me in order to a) always have up to date contact information b) have a central place where I can browse photos and c) have a quick introduction to new people that I friend, and see what they are into d) and keep tabs on what all my weak connections are up to. I don't have any major issues with Facebook.
2) I'm selective about what I watch, so I don't browse YouTube. I watch the Daily Show and selected PBS documentaries online. Occaisionally I rent a movie from Amazon Unbox, but the selection is terrible. I use NetFlix to watch old The Wire and West Wing episodes. I wish I could watch those shows online, but they are not available.
3) I wish there was a small niche news site for thoughtful political commentary and policy analysis (as opposed to the endless ranting on reddit). New.ycombinator and programming.reddit.com are great for my programming, business, and startup news.