As you may of heard, as of March 9th, 2010, Comedy Central is pulling The Daily Show and the Colbert Report off Hulu. Now I enjoy these shows and Hulu has allowed me to watch them with surprising ease. I know that each show is posted on it's own site as well, but honestly, neither site can compare in ease of use or quality to Hulu. I'm going to miss the shows. Effectively, they have been cancelled for me because I refuse to check Comedy Central's flawed site every day for full episodes when the perfect delivery method has already been created. I've submitted the following to them, and I await a response.
Dear Comedy Central,
I've already written out a genius quality letter that was meticulously edited and picked over until it said exactly how I felt about The Daily Show and Colbert Report being pulled from Hulu. Then it got erased by sheer idiocy on my part. I'm sorry that you can't read it in all it's beauty. It would've brought tears to your eyes. So I'll just list out why I watched them on Hulu and not thedailyshow.com or colbertnation.com.
1. The video quality is top notch. Your site has one quality setting - worse than YouTube, which is somewhat ironic since Colbert has been boasting about HD as of late.
2. I can subscribe to the shows. They pop up in my Queue with my other subscribed items and I can then just start at the top and play through them all. Honestly, it's easier than watching a DVD. Your site has a hidden RSS feed true, but all it links to is the clips which are presented in a jumbled sort of order in my feed reader.
3. The Hulu Desktop client - the reason it's easier than a DVD. I open it, it shows me my Queue, I hit play, and away it goes. I maximize it on one monitor and then start reviewing my e-mail, calendar, etc...
In light of these benefits to using Hulu, I want to know why you have chosen to ditch it and, more importantly, what you are doing to replace it. There are many other thing Hulu does better than you, the embeddable player for example, that many people (as seen in the forums and Hulu blog comments) are going to miss. If you require me to check your site every day for new episodes, sorry, it's not going to happen. I didn't do it with Hulu (the Queue did it for me), and I'm not doing it for you.