Sass & Sorcery

Since ditching cable service, I've been reliant on the intarwebs for my daily Daily Show fix. But Viacom pulled their Comedy Central lineup from Hulu starting yesterday (or, at the very least, all two programs in their lineup that I actually watch).

In spirit of supporting the content I love, I watched Tuesday's program last night, via thedailyshow.com. Tried to watch would be more accurate, as the video buffer froze at the same spot during the interview. Multiple times. Reloading the page, fast-forwarding and rewinding did nothing to solve the problem. (And then there's the ads. Dear Haruhi, the ads.)

I guess I'm spoiled on Hulu's delivery, both in network response and actual site layout. The option for HD looks to be missing from the Comedy Central site, which was a huge plus for how the roommate and I watch (though I haven't actually peeked around; might do that later). Also, I really, really like Hulu's simplicity; the official Daily Show and Colbert sites weren't designed with minimalism in mind, methinks, and it shows that episode content provision is something of an afterthought.

Hulu's ads seemed to be more aware of their audiences; Comedy Central, not so much. I guess it's the specifics of an 18-to-whatever male target, but where there's some overlap, I don't identify with the demographic at large. (To be fair, I mute the ads on Hulu by reflex, though the ads on Comedy Central annoy me so much more.)

So here I am, facing a bit of an overblown dilemma: make the move to the Comedy Central site feeds or boycott (in fairly useless protest) the decision to pull quality programming from a professional delivery service. I believe the decision was not in the best interests of the fans, due to content consumption issues (can't watch what doesn't stream, heh), and I don't pretend to understand the ad-revenue economics driving said decision ('cause, y'know, numbers are icky).

It's just, on a deep (read: shallow) consumer level, it goes against my selfish desire for uninterrupted laughing at the pains of modern American life.