'Daily Show' set to launch Web archive: report

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Viacom is set to unveil a Web site that will include about 13,000 video clips of its popular "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," representing every minute of the show since its 1999 inception, according to a published report.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the new site is a change of strategy for the media conglomerate, which has previously made available only a sampling of recent video clips from the show on its Web site, and has sued Google (Charts, Fortune 500) unit YouTube, seeking $1 billion and the removal of pirated segments from its shows such as "The Daily Show," "South Park" and "The Colbert Report" on the video sharing site.

Fans of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" will be able to access a full archive of all the show's clips on a new Web site, according to a published report.

Google and YouTube said they've made an effort to remove copyrighted material from the site when made aware of it. This week they announced a program under which copyright holders can provide YouTube with advance copies of their programming for identification purposes, and then YouTube will use new software to automatically remove clips as users post them, according to the report.

Despite battling with YouTube, Paul Beddoe-Stephens, vice president for digital media at Comedy Central, told the paper that the success of Comedy Central clips on the video sharing site helped Viacom (Charts) recognize the true value of putting the archives online.

To prepare for the launching of the site, 16 Comedy Central writers and video encoders have worked two shifts a day on the project since June, according to the report. Erik Flannigan, executive vice president for digital media at MTV Networks, the Viacom unit that includes Comedy Central, said one particular challenge for the site was designing ads that would satisfy advertisers without turning off viewers.

"Nobody wins when you have a 30-second ad in front of a 45-second piece of video," he told the paper.

The paper says that the site, which will be found at www.thedailyshow.com, will include a database of clips searchable by both date and topic. As of Thursday morning, Internet users going to that site were being redirected to the existing "Daily Show" page on the Comedy Central Web site.