Viacom gets greedy...

[fatediesel]

Viacom has taken down their recent content from their websites.

The takedown, which was first spotted by BTIG’s Richard Greenfield, seems to affect a wide range of content: Clips and older long-form episodes are still available but most current or new full episodes aren’t being offered at Comedycentral.com, MTV.com or the other network sites. “We still have hundreds of long-form episodes remain online, for free, but we have temporarily slimmed down our offerings as DirecTV markets them as an alternative to having our networks,” Viacom spokesman Carl Folta explained during a phone conversation; more than 4,500 episodes are still up, he told us after checking. Folta also said Hulu and other partners who pay Viacom for its programming will continue to get it and be able to serve it up as usual.

Viacom's stupidity amazes me. For one people are still going to be able to get their content on Hulu (or illegally through torrents) so it's not like they are preventing people from getting it, they now will just bypass Viacom's sites. This also is going to lead to more people taking DirecTV's side in the dispute.

Also, just for curiosity's sake I went to Comedy Central's site and when I got to the page a full screen commercial came up about DirecTV dropping Viacom's channels. It was about 30 seconds long and there was no way to close the commercial or mute it. People that go to Viacom's sites aren't going to want to see forced commercials about a carriage dispute.