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.

laxity

[esocid]

I don't think Viacom was really strict about SP being online to begin with. I remember countless websites offering SP episodes for free, many of which were crappy websites, but were around for quite some time. I haven't frequented them in some time but I don't ever recall hearing any outburst from Viacom about SP being made freely available. It is commendable for Matt and Trey to come out and get Viacom to actually put it in writing that it is free online (via their website) but I still don't see any other sites getting hammered b/c of what they do. Another win for freely available content. Now if only they would host Cannibal! The Musical [cannibalthemusical.net].

Censored Mohammad episode

[crow]

Remember after the Mohammad cartoon panic, the episode where they were making a big deal that they were going to show Mohammad? The end where they were going to show him was apparently censored by Comedy Central. Is it cut in the online version?

Re:Obligatory

[Hatta]

I haven't seen it, but I heard about it. That's just too much. Cat Piss (CP) has been a running joke on drug sites for years. There even used to be an Erowid spoof, the Vaults of Meowid, complete with information about a supposed tryptophan derivitive 5-MeO-W. I've got to wonder, have Trey and Matt been visiting the Shroomery much?

Re:Censored Mohammad episode

[Shados]

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

I downloaded it 20 minutes after it was broadcast.

[Joce640k]

...at about 600kb a second.

That's the kind of service the studios should be aiming for if they want people to subscribe to something. It shouls also cost about $0.10 - that's what it would cost me on cable and I don't see why Internet is really much different, BitTorrent means I'm paying the bandwidth fees myself.

When that's set up they might have a chance of getting me to "do the decent thing". Anything else is a ripoff.

Re:no drm

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

So, if there is no DRM, does that mean the various video downloaders can save a copy in the clear to the user's hard disk?

Re:Illegally?

[WNight]

And before that (and still ongoing) is paying off stations to play the music the studios want, not whatever the station wanted.

Controlling retail channels was the scummiest. I don't care if you sell anything, but don't specifically handicap my ability to sell a competing product. There's competition and there's abuse of monopoly.

Re:Censored Mohammad episode

[mecenday]

No. They gave an interview on the Penn Jillette radio show where they were basically daring Comedy Central to allow them to run it with uncensored images of Mohamed. The execs said, "no way, no how, and if you present us with an uncensored copy, we will butcher it ourselves." The guys decided to cut it in a way that would actually be funny.

So, though the version that was run was a Trey and Matt creation, it was under threat of censorship.

Re:Illegally?

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, but making it legal to download will take all the fun out of it ...

And what will happen to Mr Twig dot net? He's been my go-to site for South Park for a long time and I'm not going to abandon him just because Comedy Central or Viacom or Haliburton says I can "get it from them" now.

Have to be careful here. Just because Comedy Central does something that's in their own best interest does not suddenly make them "cool". They are still "the man" and I'm still planning to stick it to them, dude.

Re:Illegally?

[ajcham]

00s seems fine - but only when written.

Personally I'd rather waste my breath on a phrase like 'the first decade of the twenty-first century' than use a god-awful term like 'the noughties' [shudder].

Re:US only..

[skerit]

Right, instead of really saying "it's free - here it is!" they still have to impose some stupid rules. Stop creating virtual boundaries!! To me it goes against everything the internet stands for (*drama*)