South Park Episodes Going Online for Free

Comedy Central has announced plans to put every episode of its long-running, button-pushing social satire, South Park, online for free. Like the recent move to stream episodes of the channel's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, this marks a sea change for Comedy Central's parent company, Viacom: In the past, its new-media newsmaking has largely been confined to lawsuits against YouTube, whose users have enjoyed posting paltry 20-second clips of the show on the site.

Of course, full episodes of South Park have long been available via sites whose name we won't mention here. The online success of The Daily Show has demonstrated to Viacom that it actually makes a bit more fiscal sense to sit back and watch the money roll in from a monetized online version of its content, rather than investing money and effort into the pursuit of taking down the Google-owned YouTube for its inability to regulate the actions of every single one of its users.







Speaking to Reuters on the relation between the success of online content verses TV ratings, chairman and chief executive of MTV Networks Judy McGrath said, "One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination. That is kind of our hat trick."

On a more symbolic level, Techdirt notes that this marks a return to its roots for South Park, which started life as one of the Web's first successful viral videos. In the mid-90s, a short animated film by University of Colorado students Matt Stone and Trey Parker found its way to the desk of Fox executive Brian Graden, who commissioned a second film from the writers, leading to the creation of the Christmas classic, "Jesus Vs. Santa."

The rest is, as they say, Internet history.