Comedy Central has announced that on November 1, they will launch Motherload, a broadband IPTV service. Yes, it will include The Daily Show because, if it didn’t, no one would have noticed the press release.
This is a cool idea; Comedy Central has decent traction among the high-bandwidth crowd thanks to the Daily Show and they probably realize that they get a lot of publicity from the file trading of clips of the show. They don’t issue C&Ds to everyone who posts them because it gets them more viewers. Motherload gives them the ability to bring those people back to their site (read: more advertising), but also gets eyes on new shows. It’s an incubator for new content.
We’ll see how they screw this up (they have the dreaded “$SERVICE Video player” phrase in the press release, so some kind of wonky DRM is obviously going to be a part of this (WMV? Real Player?) Hopefully it’s not too intrusive.
Hey Comedy Central, chuck some bucks at Odeo and get video enclosures set up for you content so it can get fed right into iPod with Videos. Mmmm…. RSS Tivo.