The video archive on the Comedy Central website hosted footage from every episode of The Daily Show since 1999, clips from all 11 seasons of The Colbert Report, bits from Key & Peele, South Park, and Workaholics, and more. Yesterday, Paramount removed the video archive and its 25 years of footage from the site, where a popup now tells you "most Comedy Central series are no longer available," but "you can sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows."
While we can assume some of that archive will make the transfer to Paramount+—presumably whichever shows seem most profitable to Paramount Global's trio of CEOs, who recently declared a cost-cutting campaign to address the corporation's failing finances (via Hollywood Reporter)—the erasure continues what's been a dire month for media preservation. Earlier this week, Paramount shuttered MTVnews.com and culled its two decades of news coverage, as reported by Variety. Last week, the Internet Archive removed access to 500,000 digitized books, following a lawsuit from major book publishers.
