Tech Town, NC

One of the few shows that I will actually tolerate ads for is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. However, Viacom and their $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube made it difficult to find the best and freshest clips from the show.

Up to now the best place to watch these shows online has been comedycentral.com’s video site, where all the ad revenue gets funneled into Viacom’s coffers, not Google’s. Fair enough, I’m a bit supporter of content creators maintaining control of and benefiting from their work. However, the site was not great at indexing the daily show clips and was infamous for rolling annoying Doritos ads with Missy Elliott every clip and a half.

Enter TheDailyShow.com, the first step in a far-reaching fragmentation strategy for Viacom’s online content. The new site is plastered with ads for “The Darjeeling Limited” which must have the largest online ad budget of any movie to date. Whether or not this fragmentation integrates any technology from their previous acquisition, Mojiti, remains to be seen. A quick check at Mojiti.com still shows no clips from Viacom properties. Odd.

The interface is actually quite excellent, featuring a slider to pin down the exact time frame you want, similar to Google’s slider for Google Finance (see screenshot below). You can see Jon back in the early days (1999) before his hair turned all salt and pepper. It’s a bit like watching those awkward old MTV clips of the VJ’s when Cable TV was this wild new technology. Anyway, the site also offers an obligatory tag cloud and social features provided by “Flux,” a decentralized social networking platform. Flux is part of Social Media, Inc., which was founded by former members of the TagWorld team, which was a more traditional, centralized social network. Interestingly, MTV (a Viacom property) is a minority investor in TagWorld. It’s all so delightfully incestuous.

Overall my impressions of the new site are very positive. It’s much easier to find clips, and the number clips available is huge. The site boasts over 7,000 videos, which Viacom claims encapsulates every Daily Show ever aired, though I think that only covers the Jon Stewart era (which is fine, it was a different show with Kilborn). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the ads are much less irritating. If Viacom can continue to make useful, well indexed catalogues of quality show available, and keep the ads to a tolerable level, they may not be the bunch of clowns they’ve been portrayed as.

So how did they improve the usability and search of the site? How did Clown co. make something that is pleasant to use? One quick look at who’s indexing the videos tells us a lot - “Powered by Google,” of course.