South Park To Be Available Online Free and Legal

garnetlion writes "South Park is coming online, free and legal. My brief research has not indicated if it will use DRM, require some silly Windows-only software or be otherwise substandard. According to a Wired blog article, 'Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got 'really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.'" In this regard South Park joins fellow Comedy Central notable The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, whose archive was made freely available online late last year.

More free, legal TV online

[DogDude]

Just discovered last week... NBC has the entire season 4 of The Office online, watchable in full screen, with traditional TV-like ads interrupting the shows. Of course, nobody likes ads, but it's worth it to me, at least, and I'm glad to see some of the old-school media companies like NBC FINALLY starting to "get it".

Well, link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.southparkstudios.com/ [southparkstudios.com]

Works fine with Mozilla, etc. I believe it's flash.

Re:Illegally?

[Rob T Firefly]

Not sure how their particular deal works, but I think if Comedy Central actually owns the show they make, then they could have actually been criminally breaking the copyright of their own employers and in theory could be sued for it. IANAL, etc.

Re:Illegally?

[boguslinks]

Dont' assume they have the copyright to the show just because they're the creative guys behind it. When Arthur C. Clarke reprinted a chapter from 2001: A Space Odyssey in the sequel novel, he had to get permission from the publisher of 2001.

Re:Illegally?

[snowraver1]

They don't own it, Viacom owns it.

Wrong tense.

[The-Bus]

The episodes are already online. Not "coming soon", not "to be"... you can see them right now.

Re:Wrong tense.

[Ruke]

Parent beat me to it. I know that my roommate's been watching South Park online [southparkstudios.com] for at least a week now...

no drm

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a flash based web player. there's no drm. same deal with all the new video from mtv networks. flash players, no windows stuff, etc.

* i work for mtv networks doing video syndication, so i'm posting anonymously.

Re:Wrong tense.

[Creepy Crawler]

Whether or not you should commit suicide.

That's the soliloquy of "kill myself or not".

Re:Wrong tense.

[Azarael]

They aren't available in Canada (and elsewhere?) yet.

Re:Illegally?

[MightyMartian]

I'm sure there will be more support for such activity when the RIAA finally admits they wasted all the money from the Napster case suing grannies and basically ruining all the good will that the recording industry ever had. Not many artists will continue to support that kind of stupidity when it gets rubbed in their face harshly like that.

What good will has the recording industry ever had? Between the manipulation and outright theft from artists to the foisting of crap pseudo-artists to maintain product flow through to the ripping off of the consumer, the record industry has been notorious for decades. This latest "fuck you" to the consumer is perfectly in line with an industry that has long held everybody save the shareholder in absolute contempt.

Unless you are in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

^
http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/notavailable/sorry_CA01.jpg [southparkstudios.com]

-Jin

Re:More free, legal TV online

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather pay $2 on iTunes, get to keep it and have no commercials..

Re:Daily Show "Archive"

[irishdaze]

Go here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml [thedailyshow.com]. Slide the slider to a date to get the Episode Number that aired on that date. Type that Episode Number in the Search box. The episode will be there in clips. For example, I went there: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml [thedailyshow.com], slid the slider to March 20, 2008. The first clip in the results showed it was Episode 13039. I then typed "13039" (no quotes) in the Search box. Voila! 5 clips were displayed. I added up all of the running times, and it was 18 minutes, 59 seconds, which seems to me to be about right for a 30-minute show (shy of commercials and non-informational transitions).

It's not the 1/2-hour unbroken stream you want, but it's there.

Re:Illegally?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not just sure, He's HIV positive.

Flamebait? Somebody didn't see the recent South Park episode [wikipedia.org], did they?

Re:no drm

[Mavakoy]

It also doesn't work in England, with a "Sorry England. Full episodes coming soon" [southparkstudios.com] screen...

And from the URL, it'll probably not work in other countries either.

Informative? Huh?

[NotQuiteReal]

I know many of you don't rtfa, but sheesh, you had to have at least seen the summary, you know, the first story thingy at the top of this page...

The very first thing after "garnetlion writes" is that very same "informative" link.

Re:Wrong tense.

[Suddenly_Dead]

Alas, non-Americans get this screen [southparkstudios.com], or a variation [southparkstudios.com] thereof [southparkstudios.com].

Re:Obligatory

[spun]

I worked with Matt & Trey's web production team on an online video game store back in 2000. I met them and hung out a few times. They were dosed to the gills that year at the Oscars.

Re:Well, link

[Anonymous Coward]

Chokes with Linux / Firefox.

It works fine on Ubuntu Gutsy. I've watched several episodes there over the last week.

I hate flash video on Linux, though. When the hell is Adobe finally get Flash using accelerated video? It's ridiculous when my processor usage jumps to 99% whenever I try to watch a tiny flash video, where VLC doesn't even hit 10% doing h.264 720p fullscreen using XVideo out.

Re:Wrong tense.

[Daas]

Even better, you can get free online episodes of South Park, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report legally on

www.thecomedynetwork.ca

Re:USA only...

[Tranzistors]

Strange, it works ok in Latvia. Maybe they hate British in life as much as in series?

Re:Illegally?

[Artuir]

I hate to burst your bubble but south park's creators have had this stuff up on their site for weeks. The summary makes it seem like it will happen soon but in reality all of the episodes have been viewable before now.

Re:Censored Mohammad episode

[bogjobber]

They have showed images of Mohammad uncensored before in the Super Best Friends episode. It was before the Danish cartoon controversy while the Cartoon Wars episode was after, so I'm not sure if Comedy Central actually censored the cartoon or it was a political statement or joke.

Re:More free, legal TV online

[Sancho]

You forgot to put the word keep in quotation marks.

If it's DRMed, you don't get to keep it. You get to watch it until the content provider decrees that you can't anymore.

Re:More free, legal TV online

[Mex]

" I am sure that Comedy Central will do a worse job than the pirates did. It will be just like when they got Colbert off of YouTube and replaced it with something worse."

Did you even bother to check the South Park site? It's really good, actually.

Full episodes, 3 segments per episode and usually one ad per segment. You can fast forward or back if you want and you don't get another advert.

All seasons from the beginning at pretty good quality (not DVD but very good for online), except for the most recent season which apparently needs 1 month to be shown.

Re:Censored Mohammad episode

[Schnapple]

hmm? I always thought that the censoring by the network was PART of the joke...

Sort of [wikipedia.org]. Basically, the SP guys wanted to make an episode about the Muhammad illustration controversy and when Comedy Central caught wind of it, they said they wouldn't allow the image Muhammad to be displayed in the show. So, Matt & Trey expanded the notion to basically be a story-within-a-story where in the show the characters were blasting the Fox network for refusing to show the image in an episode of Family Guy whereas in reality, Comedy Central was refusing to show the image in an episode of South Park. The producers hoped that the weeklong stint between the episodes would coerce Comedy Central into changing its mind, and they fought with the network right up until the night the second part was aired, but ultimately Comedy Central chose note to display the image.

The whole incident is similar to how the outcry over the content of the 1999 South Park movie paralleled the outcry over the contents of the Terrence and Phillip movie within the South Park movie.

Re:How is this different?

[edwdig]

This is legal, South Park Zone isn't.