‘Daily Show’ Web site to Stream Archives

Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” has launched a new Web site, DailyShow.com, that will present almost the entire nine-year video archive of the show.

The site includes over 16,000 video clips starting in early 1999 with Jon Stewart and the MTV Networks show. Earlier seasons starting in 1996 with host Craig Kilborn may be introduced in early 2008.

The site will not include uninterrupted full-length episodes, though viewers can largely piece together full shows from the clips. The site’s home page will feature the previous night’s episode, with clips posted by 8 a.m. EST the next morning — eventually
at 5 a.m.

Clips will be tagged and organized by subject categories and correspondent or celebrity names involved in the segment, and visitors can use a timeline to locate clips by date and with search tools powered by Google.

Dailyshow.com will be the only place to see the full library of legal “Daily Show” clips online, though selected clips may be syndicated on other sites, such as a recent agreement with Yahoo.com to feature clips from correspondent Rob Riggle’s reports from Iraq. Google’s YouTube has previously hosted many unlicensed versions of the clips.

The site will feature banner ads and video ads integrated into the clips, with a more consumer-friendly ad unit than preroll.

Other shows in the Comedy Central family will receive similar web destinations.

The South Park Studios website will launch in March with its own video archive, and “The Colbert Report” and the Comedy Central library of stand-up comedy may also get full-archived sites in the first-half of 2008.

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