UK fans of America’s leading satirical TV show got a shock today when they discovered they could no longer view the show on its website.

The website has forums where overseas fans of the show have been venting their rage at the block. Not just UK viewers but those from Ireland who can no longer watch the show on the UK licensee Channel Four’s website yet also remain blocked from watching it on the show’s website, apparently because C4 hasn’t bothered to tell the Daily Show’s channel, Comedy Central, that it’s blocked the Irish. People in the rest of Europe have no such problems.

There’s no statement from either Channel Four or the show about this out-of-the-blue block but it appears from past Daily Show statements on their forum that they only do the blocking on the request of a country’s license holder. Incidentally, I was able to leave a comment on their website and I see that the show’s producers do respond to comment. Channel Four offers no such option, there is no comment space offered for the show and they have no forum or similar space for viewers to talk back to them.

What is particularly sad/appalling about Channel Four’s actions is that all online video from the extensive Daily Show online archive is now being blocked for UK – yet Channel Four is only showing the past week’s shows online! Do they even have rights to episodes from before they started showing the Daily Show, because I can’t watch clips from 2000.

What is so stupid about this (and it has multiple layers of stupid) is that I have been posting clips on my blog which promotes the show Channel Four have rights to! Now none of those embedded clips work and so the show gets no (free) promotion from me or the many others who embed clips.

When the Daily Show’s sister program The Colbert Report was being shown on a UK cable channel you couldn’t watch clips on their website – but you could watch clips embedded on other websites. This makes complete sense as if you liked what you saw it promoted the cable channel’s show and made it far more likely that you’d bother to subscribe to it. It also makes it appear that C4′s block request included blocking embedded clips.

At the same time that one bit of C4 takes this completely stupid action another makes clips from C4 news freely available, even ad free!

Here’s another stupidity. I have watched clips from US shows which have served up country specific ads. On sites like HuffPost I get UK ads. So if you can recognise I’m from the UK you can monetise it to the benefit of the UK license holder. Hardly rocket science.

What C4 are doing is tragic for the Daily Show itself as it is going to lose a significant chunk of its UK audience. All – one would assume – in the name of driving viewers back to watching the show on More4 ON TV!

I hope that the show’s resident Brit, the hugely popular John Oliver, learns about it and tells Channel Four to stop behaving like idiots.

Of course people can watch Daily Show clips if they know how to get around the block by hiding their computer’s ip address. This means C4 lose out on any hope of ad revenue. I won’t even bother linking to how because a simple Google (or a look on the Daily Show’s forums where they allow comments explaining how) will tell you what to do. So not only are C4 idiots but they think the rest of us UK fans of the show are too.

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A third year BA Honours Journalism student studying at Middlesex University and based at the Journalism Centre Harlow College has emailed me the following questions. As always, I make the responses public.

1. What effect do you think the increase in Internet news sites will have on newspapers?

It’s already had an effect – increased competition, increased immediacy and reduced costs. But it’s not just news sites – the internet enables people and organisations to communicate with each other without needing news media to do it for them. That’s a real challenge.

2. How do you see the Internet evolving, in terms of providing people with news?

Databases will become increasingly important – the ability to personalise the information we drill down to. Geo positioning will perform a similar function. Social networks will also perform an increasingly important role in filtering news for us. The distinction between conversation and publishing will become increasingly vague.

3. Does the future of news lie in the Internet?

What do you mean by ‘the future of the news’? If you mean will news increasingly be consumed and transmitted on the internet, well, yes.

He replied: What I mean by ‘Does the future of news lie in the Internet?’ is will the Internet put an end to the traditional press? As through my research I have found a number of media analysts who say that this is what will eventually happen and by looking at the newspapers readership figures it is clear to see that they are declining – even if it is slowly.

I’m not someone who believes the press will be ‘killed off’ by the web. As a technology paper has plenty of advantages (although I won’t repeat the bullshit about reading it in the bath). Culturally people have a lot of associations with paper. It works well as a document, a snapshot; it has high resolution and serendipity.  It wasn’t killed off by other media – but it did have to adapt, and it will again. So whatever the “traditional press” is, yes, that will “end” insofar as it will change.

My guess is most papers will either go free, or become high quality glossy weeklies. But I do believe paid for daily national and regional newspapers will struggle and disappear or go web-only (as is already happening) both because the economics no longer support the profit margins investors bought into, and because readers are less and less willing to pay for that serendipity and breadth and read it every day.

We should also remember that the web has not seen a proliferation of news discussion and analysis so much as its increased visibility. This stuff has always taken place away from printed paper – but now we can see it on screen, and it is easier for us to find people to talk about shared interests.

4. What can the Internet offer someone that a newspapers can not?

Personalisation, conversation, immediacy, multimedia, social connection, utility, infinite space and time, connectivity, permanence… how long have you got? Not that print doesn’t have advantages too.

5. Will it have an effect on Television news and if so how?

Again, it already has. Broadcasters now have to think about how their relationship with the viewer spills out online, so they are asking for contributions of content (video, images, emails, texts etc), providing extra information online, and distributing their video using channels such as YouTube, Facebook, etc. I would expect that to continue, with more attention paid to building and engaging with online communities around news brands and the issues, and more thought about how TV news can offer additional services with web technologies.

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