Daily Show archive blocked for UK: Channel Four display several layers of stupid

UK fans of America's leading satirical TV show got a shock today when they discovered they could no longer view the show on its website.

The website has forums where overseas fans of the show have been venting their rage at the block. Not just UK viewers but those from Ireland who can no longer watch the show on the UK licensee Channel Four's website yet also remain blocked from watching it on the show's website, apparently because C4 hasn't bothered to tell the Daily Show's channel, Comedy Central, that it's blocked the Irish. People in the rest of Europe have no such problems.

There's no statement from either Channel Four or the show about this out-of-the-blue block but it appears from past Daily Show statements on their forum that they only do the blocking on the request of a country's license holder. Incidentally, I was able to leave a comment on their website and I see that the show's producers do respond to comment. Channel Four offers no such option, there is no comment space offered for the show and they have no forum or similar space for viewers to talk back to them.

What is particularly sad/appalling about Channel Four's actions is that all online video from the extensive Daily Show online archive is now being blocked for UK - yet Channel Four is only showing the past week's shows online! Do they even have rights to episodes from before they started showing the Daily Show, because I can't watch clips from 2000.

What is so stupid about this (and it has multiple layers of stupid) is that I have been posting clips on my blog which promotes the show Channel Four have rights to! Now none of those embedded clips work and so the show gets no (free) promotion from me or the many others who embed clips.

When the Daily Show's sister program The Colbert Report was being shown on a UK cable channel you couldn't watch clips on their website - but you could watch clips embedded on other websites. This makes complete sense as if you liked what you saw it promoted the cable channel's show and made it far more likely that you'd bother to subscribe to it. It also makes it appear that C4's block request included blocking embedded clips.

At the same time that one bit of C4 takes this completely stupid action another makes clips from C4 news freely available, even ad free!


Here's another stupidity. I have watched clips from US shows which have served up country specific ads. On sites like HuffPost I get UK ads. So if you can recognise I'm from the UK you can monetise it to the benefit of the UK license holder. Hardly rocket science.
 What C4 are doing is tragic for the Daily Show itself as it is going to lose a significant chunk of its UK audience. All - one would assume - in the name of driving viewers back to watching the show on More4 ON TV!

I hope that the show's resident Brit, the hugely popular John Oliver, learns about it and tells Channel Four to stop behaving like idiots.

Of course people can watch Daily Show clips if they know how to get around the block by hiding their computer's ip address. This means C4 lose out on any hope of ad revenue. I won't even bother linking to how because a simple Google (or a look on the Daily Show's forums where they allow comments explaining how) will tell you what to do. So not only are C4 idiots but they think the rest of us UK fans of the show are too.

Addendum: Tony Lee has commented on the cross-post of this on the Online Journalism blog that:

Channel 4 denies the above.  I wrote them and got the following response:

Thank you for contacting us regarding THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART.

We would advise that although we do indeed hold UK broadcast rights for the series, the overall rights to the series are owned by Comedy Central themselves. Content on their website, as with other American networks, is blocked to residents not in the US. These blocks are placed by the channel themselves, not Channel 4.

It is the same with content on UK broadcasters website being blocked to those outside the UK. The reason for this is copyright and broadcasting licence terms.

We would suggest that you therefore direct your complaint on this issue to Comedy Central. You can do so via the following link:

http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml

Channel 4 is not responsible for third-party websites.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact us here at Channel 4 and for your interest in our programming.

Regards,

Rachel Salinger
Channel 4 Viewer Enquiries

This is the exact opposite of what Comedy Central say on their forum - so I will post this statement there and see what they have to say for themselves.

There is an actly petition:

petition @ComedyCentral to  lift the IP block for #dailyshow video online UK http://act.ly/mr RT to sign #actly

Addendum two


A fix has been posted on the Daily Show fan forum (ironically) http://forum.thedailyshow.com/tds/board/message?board.id=support_2008_oct&message.id=2897#M2897 (and it works)

Delegating as deniability

Two great journos going head-to-head. Hur, hur.

Bob Woodward plainly enjoying himself and Colbert spiking the Bush inadequacy.

Priceless.

God is a pussy

But then... there's this ...

"Number one, speaking from an evangelical perspective, the current administration, I believe, has delayed the second coming of Jesus."

A bizarre endorsement.

Will McCain drop out?

Back in June I highlighted a story by Steve Rosenbaum suggesting that McCain will be forced off the GOP ticket because he's losing:

The polls all show that McCain's pro-war stance and Bush endorsement make him a lost cause in November

Post Palin and with even worse polls, today Andrew Sullivan is refloating this possibility:

I have to say I'm beginning to wonder if McCain will have to withdraw. Or can they switch after the nomination? To have your first presidential decision to be this bad, and to have your decision-making process and executive skill revealed as Michael Brown-level: how can he recover?

People keep forgetting. McCain has little to no executive experience. He's been a Congressman and Senator his whole career. He got the nomination by default. And this is the only executive decision we have to go on to judge his fitness for the office.

I mean: we have all just watched his decision-making process in real time: the whole country.

Do you really want that level of competence and thoroughness in the White House? In wartime? When making decisions about Iran and Russia? The prospect is terrifying.

And Daily Kos is running a poll on who'll replace him - their readers think Mitt Romney.

Matt Frei? Misses the point again - completely fails to say it's all about McCain's way of making decisions that's causing the vetting to be happening now. Webb? Same again.

BBC? blah.

Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now

The Guardian has some of this right but the Times seems more on the ball, Danny Finkelstein runs today with last night's Colbert Report question: Should it be Palin-Romney?

As Rosenbaum was pointing out, Republicans don't like to lose. So McCain being forced out isn't a mad idea at all. And it'll be a joy to watch the likes of Frei explaining his 'shock'.

Here's Colbert:

BBC "essentially a socialist enterprise"

Google Reader clips catch up

• The Five Mistakes Clinton Made
  Karen Tumulty in Time. One mistake is simply not understanding the rules for primaries and delegate counting - she has a quite astonishing tale of Mark Penn's idiocy.
• Firefox: Can browsers make bucks?
  Rory Cellan-Jones gets a demo of v. 3.0 for BBC NEWS | dot.life and he thinks he sees how they'll do it, via Google.
• Disintermediation of minds?
  Via Media Influencer
  'There has been a proliferation of tools that help me aggregate but there are still very few tools that help me filter. Part of the reason may be that the human mind is the best filter of all but, surely, there is room for tools that can help me to it easier and better.'
• Street View Sabotage!
  Google Sightseeing has this funny tale
  'The saboteurs must have been extremely quick on their feet of course, as the bag appeared without any warning while the car was travelling at speed.'
• It’s not just video
  Dave Briggs explains on the DC10plus blog about the importance of tagging to pull in content and create a legacy from an event.
  
  
• New Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ready to test drive
• More Gov live blogging
  Simon Dickson is at it again with the video and the bleeding edge and takes my point about the yet-to-be-demonstrated worth of liveblogging of election coverage.
  'But for something like this, it can provide an excellent channel for colour commentary, or even ‘context sensitive links’: when we did the ProGov event, people were contributing URLs providing additional background on the points being raised, for people who didn’t know the subjects. (Like, for example, me.)' — I agree.
  
• Come Together, Now? The World Live Web and Politics
  Micah L. Sifry was watching the Indiana/NC coverage with sound down and ended up focusing on the quite fascinating comment streams on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's official blogs.
• Should TV news bias be overt?
  Roy Greenslade says no.
  
• Lawrence O'Donnell: Hillary Will Drop Out by June 15
  
  
• Girls turned off IT careers by lack of role models - ComputerWeekly.com
  No role models. Even though they're there - see my post on this.
  
• Has Facebook Jumped the Shark as a Political Tool?
  Colin Delany says
  
  • Facebook is Not (Yet) a Mass-Communications Tool
  • Facebook Advocacy: Too Many Groups, Too Little Attention
  • The Presidential Experience: Facebook Is Nice To Have, But...
  He does provide Elements of a Successful Political Facebook Strategy.
• Art Brodsky: Why The 'Right' Gets Net Neutrality Wrong
  'Those [profits from netbiz] results were achieved under mandated Net Neutrality, the original, fundamental characteristic of the Internet that protects the individual consumer's freedom to innovate without permission and to receive, and pay for, the services he or she chooses. Why a conservative opposes that, I'll never know.'
• Operation Anti-Chaos: The Narrative on "White Voters" Is Fiction
  Al Giordano: 'So, to sum up: Look at the damn graphs. You can see that Clinton is in a staggering free-fall among African-American voters, her favorability is down 36 points while 17 percent view her more negatively than before, while Obama's favorable and negative ratings among whites have paired at five point increases.'
  

Not on Reader:

• barackobamaisyournewbicycle
  Neat timewaster — 'Barack Obama wanted you to have some cupcakes ... Barack Obama recited a poem that reminded him of you .... '
  
• Barack Obama delegates wiki
  Not been done before - really. Another outcome of the Obama method, they did this themselves, learning from previous campaign efforts and nobody came from HQ and took them over ...

• Ya Libnan Lebanon News Live from Beirut
  Breaking News Live coverage of the Situation in Lebanon - 'liveblogging', indeed.
• Networks reportedly refused to appear on PBS' NewsHour to respond to NY Times' military analysts story; several continue blackout
  MediaMatters documenting just how the US TV News networks are trying to kill the story off, blogosphere is keeping it alive and kicking.
• Killing by the numbers
  Shocking tale from Iraq
  'In 2007 elite U.S. snipers executed an unarmed Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. Have the insidious tactics that led to atrocities in Vietnam reemerged in Iraq?'
  'Top battalion leaders, who had to sign off on the charges, have faced no serious questions about whether their demand for more bodies, their vague rules of engagement or the confusion sown by the secret program might have contributed to the events of spring 2007.'
• Political Commentariat in Group Circle Jerk
  Iain Dale, with top political bloggers list: 'The one thing which the report immediately provokes me into asking, is just who the Commentariat influences apart from its own members? How many 'normal' people are influenced by newspaper leader columns or indeed blogs? Do we all not feed each other in some amorphous way rather than be a crucial individual influence on a particular debate?'
  
  
• Face to face with climate change
  The Sun is running a blog from Alaska in their Climate Change section. Stop spluttering. Good stuff and a great object lesson in Plain English.
• The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online
  HT: Stephen Colbert!
  Hasan Elahi is tracking his entire waking moments online at trackingtransience.net.Why? Because he was once mistakenly picked up by the FBI.
  'So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,"'
  'For now, though, Big Brother is still on the case. At least according to Elahi's server logs. "It's really weird watching the government watch me," he says. But it sure beats Guantanamo.'
• When Democrats Go Post-al
  James Wolcott in Vanity Fair: 'The vicious Clinton-versus-Obama rupture at Daily Kos, the most activist site in the liberal blogosphere, reflects a party-wide split. What really rankles, as Democrats tear at one another, is the free pass they’ve given McCain—and the White House.'
• Young Video Makers Try to Alter Islam’s Face
  New York Times: 'When Ali Ardekani started fishing around on the Internet a couple of years ago for video blogs about Muslims, he did not like what he found: either the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims were depicted as bloodthirsty zealots, or they were offering defensive explanations as to why they were not.'
  “Arabic sounds foreign and scary — you don’t know what is going on,” Mr. Ardekani said in an interview at his small Sherman Oaks apartment, its walls decorated with Koranic verses. “Or they show a woman with the veil, who doesn’t speak, and it is assumed if she did speak she would say, ‘Help me!’ ”

Google Reader clips catch up

• Twitter at the tipping point
  [NB: I'm leaving my original text but Rory tells me this is meant completely ironically - read it now in that light!] From BBC dot.life. Contains an opening paragraph of such sheer onanistic pretentiousness it's worth repeating for a good belly-laugh:
  

  Suddenly everyone is talking Twitter. Just as Facebook hit the mainstream a year ago, so the short message social network has become the media flavour of this month - to such an extent you can even find me talking about it on the Today programme.
  
  But I'm not convinced that Twitter is really going to spread, in the way Facebook did, beyond the digerati into millions of people's lives. What's more, I'm struggling to understand the business model.

• Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand (David Barstow/New York Times)
  Investigative reporting, the sort they didn't do before the war.
  
• Mail Online's new look
  Jemina Kiss @ the grauniad. According to comments, it's a 2MB load! Really bad design as well.
  
• New ways into blogs
  The BBC's blog comments problem fixed (but not the 502/404 error message, now several years old)
• No Whining About the Media - Three quick points on the Democratic debate last night: (David Brooks/Campaign Stops)
  Memorandum has Brooks' defence and the critics of Brooks (that's why I like their presentational format for such online debate).
  
  
• Postcards From Yo Momma
  HT: Etre. Really funny true-life emails to offspring.
  
• PoliticsWeb2.0: On the Future of Government in the Digital Era
  TechPresident has a good series of 'semi-liveblogging' from a London conference. Opens with a report of Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, presentation covering UK eGov.
  

  Right now the UK govt has embarked on a high risk "supersite" strategy of centralizing e-govt services on two sites: DirectGov and BusinessLink (while closing down 2500 disparate e-govt sites at the same time). Both have low brand recognition and problems competing with other sources.

  This is what I've been saying for a year!
  
  
• Obama Targets Pennsylvania Voters with Pure Persuasion Ads
  ClickZ. This is new. Before they were just pleas for money.
  
• Blog On Blogging
  More BBC.
  

  The act of blogging wasn't, and still isn't, entirely uncontroversial, even here at the BBC
  

• Twitter spam spirals out of control
• If Robert Scoble is right, then Web 2.0 is dead
  A current Silicon Valley meme. Something to do with content being repurposed.
• Networking Journalism
  Great stuff from Bill Thompson who says:
  

  What has happened so far [to MSM] can be compared to the mild tremors felt before an earthquake.
  
  As the internet spreads there are more and more places where we can simply ask those who are living through the events what they think of them and seek insights and analysis from those who know the people and the places involved.
  

  This would be the death of the 'foreign correspondent' (that's you, Orla Guerin, praise be).
  
• The Pleasures of the Flesh
  George Monbiot on why we should eat less meat.
  
• Downing Street removes Labour Party link
  I had a delightful spar with the fierce looking (check the typeface on his blog) Tory wideboy who found a hole in Downing Street's bleedin' edge. Yes, the phrase 'grow up' was used.
  
  
• Civicsurf in action
  Shane McCracken has blogged at Cllr 2.0 about the experience of Norfolk County Councillor Tony Tomkinson who started blogging at the beginning of this year.
• Hillary Clinton To Appear On "Colbert Report"
  And it was dull. As was Stephen dazzled by Michelle Obama. Is he morphing into David Letterman?
  
• [Paul Bradshaw] User generated content? Or great place for a prank? Sky gets photoshopped on Marathon day
  This was truly hysterical.
  
• Social media and the dark side of doing PR
  Simon Collister on the growth of 'ghost blogging'.
• Top 10 UK search terms: social networks dominate the list

Not on Reader:

• The First 21st-Century Campaign
  National Journal overview by Ronald Brownstein on how the Democrats are reaching new heights in raising money, recruiting volunteers, hiring staff, buying TV ads, contacting voters, and generating turnout (and hence have a big edge for November).
  Time also has a piece on this - Why Democrats Rule the Web
• Youth Work and Social Networking Research Project
  Very interesting blog with some new research.
• Will economics put newspapers to bed before the readers do?
  Justin Williams blogging in the Telegraph
• Implications of Google Transit in the UK
  Tim Howgego has a very in-depth analysis on Google's latest project.
• Could the web win it in London?
  The BBC adds a bit more detail on my post Ken's already lost online but doesn't actually answer that question

Clay Shirky on Colbert Report

Not a Stephen Colbert fan (shiver) but he does have some interesting guests (and he roasted GW Bush, to his face).

• Shirky's Wikipedia page.

Andrew Keen booed - and walloped

On the Colbert Report (it follows the Daily Show on Comedy Central):



He gets booed. Can't see him selling many books from that appearance.

Keen asked for advice (on his blog) beforehand.

Anyone have any advice about how to outwit the great Stephen Colbert?

One comments that Colbert actually offers his own advice to guests on his website:

“The best laughs [my guests] can get are through correcting my [character's] stupidity,” Stephen has said. “I think it doesn’t work when they have a joke or two that they’re desperate to say on the show, and then they don’t really actually listen to the conversation. ... They’re waiting to drop the joke in the middle of the interview, and it lands there like conversational plutonium.”

Sounds like Keen listened — he's humourless all right — but still manages to come across as an intellectual snob. No wonder he's getting these US Talk shows — that's one stereotype of Brits.

Commentators on his own blog said he came across as "an elitist", "a simpleton and a jerk", "a complete arrogant elitist", "an arrogant douche", "smug pompous ass", "a bitter talentless hack with a fake british accent", "born out of bitterness", "a stiff Euro no-name", "another cheap whore" and a "grumpy old man".

One said they'd buy the book.

One said:

Sir ... Your entire enterprise, by which I mean your book, this site and above all the arguments you espouse, could only be redeemed if it were, in its entirety, a satirical project.

It's not (ahem) but any 'project' is looking a bit holed below the water. Which is a shame, because Keen's book does raises points which should be discussed. But they're not because of Keen's parade of straw-men. It's the messenger hard-selling his book (and his publishers full-bore oppositionist PR) which is polarising debate.

He's gone back on the provocative book title - "I should have defined amateur more clearly" - and below admits he's beaten in argument. What's left?

Maybe a future with MSM? See here how ABC News backgrounds his comments with clips from their, completely unbiased of course, view of what User Generated Content is.


VS.


On his blog Keen says he was "walloped" by Guardian Unlimited boss Emily Bell in an email exchange this week:

I've finally been nailed. Till now, I think I've come out at least even in all my debates with Web 2.0 boyz like Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelly and David Weinberger. But all good things come to an end. I've finally been outdebated. By a lady -- and an English lady at that.

Keen suffering a touch of the Boris Johnson's.

In my Guardian newspaper debate with Guardian Unlimited's digital supremo Emily Bell, she outwitted me and then took me to the cleaners. My hunch is that I went in a bit cocky, stuck out my chin and got a good walloping. She's a tough bird, that Emily Bell. I'm not debating her again.

A 'lady' and now a 'bird'? Love the macho fighting talk. I'd pay to see Emily actually wallop Andrew.

Speaking of being outwitted and taken to the cleaners, I'm appearing on the Colbert Report this Thursday (8/16). So those of you who want to see me get the mother of wallopings should tune in then. No doubt he'll make me the central comedy on Comedy Central (serves me right for idealizing mainstream media).

Indeed.

Some of Bell's counter-points (my emphases):

The internet challenges us all to up our game - it exponentially increases our audience, but it exposes frailty.

If the internet is so full of amateurish dross then it is no threat to the polished professional - but what you know Andrew, is that it is full of people who are potentially as good as, if not better than, those who have been fortunate enough to reside in a distribution bottleneck - and that is why you are scared.

Thank you for your praise for The Guardian and Guardian Unlimited, but without the internet we would not have reached a worldwide audience of more than 15 million a month. We have an exciting opportunity to invest in journalism for the future and build not just a national but international presence for liberal news and comment. Without the web, our particular future would look extremely different, and not in a good way.

Tell me who, under the age of 25, agrees with your golden ageism arguments? Nobody who grew up with the internet feels your sense of deathly cultural foreboding. Many of them are creating new art forms online which you would shudder at. That's the point. This is their rock 'n roll, and maybe yours has run its course.

I was snagged by your assertion that nobody under 25 had anything to contribute on issues of the new economy or, alarmingly, on Iraq. Or even on anything. I believe Colby Buzzell was 26 when he was posted to Iraq - maybe that extra year gave him the edge - but his blog, and the book that it yielded, My War: Killing Time In Iraq, is certainly more insightful than anything you or I could have written about the conflict.

There are plenty of valid and good reasons for wanting anonymity which I would not presume to question. But it means authenticity might be harder to establish. Or does it? I find myself turning up the authority on technorati searches - but it is not the authority of paid professionals, it is the authority of others who blog in the same area. Take, for instance, the blogroll on Jay Rosen's site: for someone interested in the development of the media it is a goldmine of interesting nuggets. I trust Jay not because he is a skilled academic but because he has blogged for years in an area which I am interested in and have some knowledge of. His posts are informed and attract informed opinion. If an anonymous blogger posts a damaging fallacy, how much resonance does it really acquire? More t

Amateur is not going to fully replace professional - it is idiotic and misleading to suggest it will. But it will supplement and expose mainstream media - in fact it already does.

Postscript: Keen's blog entry about doing the Colbert report.