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Trevor Noah is launching a weekly talk show podcast on Spotify
The series will also be available on other streaming platforms.
Jon Stewart slams the NSA with World of Warcraft
... And yes, he kind of slams World of Warcraft with the NSA. Following reports that the US National Security Agency was monitoring potential terrorist activity in Second Life and WoW, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart hosted a real-life, in-game interview with Aasif Mandvi as Greychalk the dwarf paladin. The joke focuses on Mandvi not realizing that some people lie about their identities online: "This place is all about trust," Mandvi says. "If we thought that people might not be who they say they are, the whole world would fall apart." But hey, Jon Stewart, joke's on you – as a few viewers point out, Mandvi is in an impossible starting area for a dwarf, he has priest spells instead of paladin ones and he's dressed as a night elf rather than a dwarf. Take that. Watch the entire episode here and the WoW clip after the break.
Lewis Black pokes at the Kinect on The Daily Show
Comedian Lewis Black took to his "Back in Black" segment on Comedy Central's The Daily Show to discuss what he sees as growing privacy concerns related to Microsoft's Xbox One. Black specifically pokes fun at the expected improvements to the Kinect's detection capabilities. Privacy concerns related to the Kinect were addressed by Microsoft earlier this month, which said that users "will determine how responsive and personalized your Xbox One is to you and your family during setup." Black's satirical take on the Kinect, as with his comments related to other products such as Google Glass, still make for an entertaining video to check out, not one to take at face value. Be warned, the video also contains mature language.
Internet Archive puts all TV news since 2009 online, helps you stay classy
Wish you could spend your evenings and weekends reliving the halcyon days of broadcast news? You should head on over to the Internet Archive. Founder Brewster Kahle has collected TV news from 20 major channels since 2009, and is making them available online from today. The archive stretches from the 24-hour CNN through to The Daily Show -- with whole episodes available to rent for a fee of $50 per disc. Kahle's planning to add additional years in reverse chronological order at least back to 2002, since that's when closed captioning (which the system uses to catalog the footage) was introduced. Unless, of course, we all fancy transcribing an hour or two of Channel 4 News circa 1975 to help out.
Leeroy Jenkins appears on The Daily Show
Seems like someone used a Scroll of Resurrection on Jon Stewart, with our beloved WoW making two separate appearances on The Daily Show this week. We all know Stewart possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of geek culture, but twice in one week? We're just saying. The first reference came on Tuesday with his Words of Warcraft bit. While addressing the mounting tension between Iran and Israel, Stewart characterized the conflict using a WoW reference on the fly-in graphic. Not a big deal, right? The follow-up came last night when Leroy Jenkins swarmed the show. Look, you really need to go see the video. If I recap the joke for you, I'll kill the joke dead. Don't worry about subtlety. Just like Jenkins himself, there's no way you're going to miss the appearance. Our favorite part? Jon's own reaction to the shenanigans. (To quote our own McCurley, "I love how Jon Stewart legitimately loves the video.")
SnapStream TV monitoring now lets OS X users keep tabs on amusing video-blunders
The Daily Show and Colbert Report famously rely upon SnapStream's high-power Windows DVR software to monitor the insanity at the fringes of America's cable spectrum. The media-monitoring software is also used by news services, educators and shadowy government agencies to keep tabs on the subjects discussed on TV. The latest edition (version five) opens the platform up to OS X users, enabling them to run it in Firefox without messy virtualization. The OS X web player comes with a plugin to watch MPEG-2 streams that'll happily sit on top of Snow Leopard or Lion and will even let you set up customized alerts for whenever inappropriate euphemisms emerge from Oprah's mouth.
Jon Stewart interviews Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson recently appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote his biography of Steve Jobs. In the seven-minute interview (embedded below), Stewart and Isaacson discuss the the process of writing the biography while trying to stay objective about its subject -- a task Isaacson admits was difficult, especially in the face of Jobs's long illness. The two men discuss something I also found fascinating about Jobs when I read the book: his extremely emotional nature. Stewart: The really interesting thing in the book is how often Steve Jobs cries. Isaacson: He's a very emotional person. That was the biggest surprise to me. Stewart: He is a weeper. They go on a bit of a tangent after that, but eventually Isaacson gets to the core of both Jobs himself and public opinion of him. "He connected emotion to technology. This is why the outpouring of grief at his death was beyond what most may have expected," Isaacson says. "I think that emotionalism came from a deep passion for artistic things." The real gem of the interview comes at the end, when Isaacson describes the difference between Jobs and Bill Gates. "In the end, [Bill Gates] makes the Zune and Steve makes the iPod." Stewart busts out laughing, along with the audience, and responds, "That is the best eulogy I have ever heard in my life." The full video's embedded below (sorry iOS users, Comedy Central doesn't offer a non-Flash version and there's nothing we can do about it), and it's definitely worth watching. If you're looking for a more comprehensive review of the biography itself, we just happen to have one right here at TUAW. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook
Hulu CEO welcomes back The Daily Show & more from Viacom, lays out a battle plan for the future
The news spinning around Hulu hasn't been positive lately, with increasing competition and rumors of a change in business model, but CEO Jason Kilar's latest blog post tells a different side of the story. First, after popular choices like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were unceremoniously yanked back in April it has a new deal with Viacom that's bringing those shows back to Hulu and Hulu Plus starting today, with episodes of current shows like Jersey Shore and Tosh.0 showing up 21 days after they air. Strictly for the pay subscribers, library episodes of The Chappelle Show and others will show up on Hulu Plus. As for the future of the business, he sees Hulu as able to serve trends giving customers more convenient video access with less ads and more social media presence -- a goal we can get behind, but that may leave content providers wondering how they'll get paid in this shiny new world. To that end he's touting the growth of Hulu's ad revenue as seen in the chart after the break and the rising number of Hulu Plus subscribers with a promise to hit 1 million this year. While that's well behind Netflix's most recent count, he's taking a new shot at the throne by claiming Hulu can afford to pay more for content and that studios should start signing deals on per-user, per-month basis instead of the flat rates Netflix has negotiated so far. Give the full thing a read to get a better idea of where Jason's head is at (when he's not planning a GTL run, check the pr after the break for more details on that), we'll be busy watching Jon Stewart's interview with Michael Steele. Update: Peter Kafka over All Things Digital has word that the deal cost Hulu somewhere between $40m and $50m -- and that sum could increase depending upon the shows' performance.
The Daily Show reacts to Verizon iPhone, Jon Stewart gets a little excited (video)
Were you excited about yesterday's iPhone announcement? Not so much as The Daily Show, which spent a whole seven minutes and 18 seconds out of its 30 minutes of programming to celebrate the announcement -- and certainly not sparing the whip when it comes to AT&T. Jon Stewart appeared to be somewhat excited, screaming in excitement at being able to use "the world's most popular almost phone" as, well, an actual phone. See it for yourself below.
Found Footage: Jon Stewart scolds Apple over the Gizmodo stolen iPhone fracas
Leave it to Jon Stewart to put things into perspective. In this segment from The Daily Show, Jon satirically cops to being an Apple user since the 80s and takes Apple to task for stealing the evil empire crown from Microsoft in their handling of the Gizmodo lost iPhone incident. After Giz gave back the iPhone, the cops busted down its editor, Jason Chen's door. "Don't they know there's an app for that?" Say what you will, I think Jon nailed it. Watch the full clip after the break. [via iPhone Savior]
The Daily Show and Colbert Report changing video capture tech for the switch to HDTV
That switch to HD for The Daily Show and Colbert Report has more results than just a sharper image of their star hosts, but also the problem of capturing HD versions of the news clips presented for skewering daily. To achieve the goal of archiving more than 30 HDTV channels daily, the show is upgrading from the bank of TiVos it previously relied on to SnapStream Server, the business option from the guys behind BeyondTV. No word on exactly how it's pulling in the channels, Dave Zatz suggests ClearQAM, Happauge's HD PVR or component capture cards as possibilities, but it looks like a couple of years of development have reduced starter costs from $6,000 to $2,000, just in case your YouTube clip show needs a little more oomph.
Stewart vs. Cramer now on Xbox Live Video Marketplace
In the most lopsided victory since Boll vs. Kyanka, Jon Stewart took on Jim Cramer last week in The Daily Show ring and -- spoiler alert -- humbled the CNBC Mad Money host in a technically brilliant, 22-minute ass whoopin'. This instant classic is now available in its "unedited" (warning: F-bomb dropping) entirety on the US Xbox Live Video Marketplace -- free for Gold subscribers.Note: The video content (257 MB) is only accessable through the console and isn't queueable from the Xbox.com Marketplace.
Screen Grabs: the Daily Show's Jon Stewart grabs a Centro for some speech critique
Our latest micro-series, Screen Grabs chronicles the uses (and occasional misuses) of real-world gadgets in today's movies and TV. Send in your sightings (with a screen grab!) to screengrabs at engadget dt com. We're not sure how this came to be, but when Jon Stewart needs to make a real / fake call to Democratic governor Mark Warner to let him know how bad his speech at the DNC "suuuuuuucked," he reaches for a Centro. Check the read link to watch the full episode, and if you don't enjoy comedy, you can just skip to about 3:29 in to see Palm's cheapo smartphone get some face-time.
Daily Show talks campaign games
We already brought the fantastic John McCain Space Invaders clone (which has you firing vetos at pigs shooting what we've recently realized are upside-down crosses) to your attention, but The Daily Show picked up on it last night, and added some of their own politically-themed games for your consideration (skip to 4:20 in the video after the break for the bit).We know they're both fictional, but are we the only ones who would totally play Yes We Cannon? No? Just us? OK.
HDTV - Digital Watch with Ed Helms
What a great way to start out another long summer week. This clip from The Daily Show was aired way back in May 2004 before many of you even had you high-def sets. This was back in the day when people really complained about not having that much to watch in high-def and the shows they were watching got recorded onto their JVC DVCR deck. Oh, the good 'ol days. Enjoy the clip!
Jon Stewart blasts Congress' ignorance towards video games
Wednesday's episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart featured a long segment based around Congress' recent hearing on the topic of the video game ratings system, which brilliantly highlights how many Congressmen and women sound like out-of-touch jackasses when it comes to discussing the topic that "anybody in any party can grandstand about".One of the most poignant parts of the show is where Jon responds to a clip of a seemingly helpless Lee Terry pleading to the hearing that "as a father of three young boys... who are avid gamers, I am very concerned about the content included in the games" by deadpanning "and as I stand there, watching them play these violent games, helpless to do anything about it, I can't help but wonder where the system has failed". Also worth a look is the end of the segment interview with Samantha Bee, a Senior PlayStationologist, from within San Andreas.It's the typical Daily Show mix of poking fun at the ignorance of people with power, coupled with an "OMG the 'House of Representatives filled with insane jackasses' might screw up my favorite past-time" hangover.
Colbert Report, Daily Show in iTunes
As of earlier this morning (8:00 AM EST), there is a page for both The Colbert Report [iTunes link] and the Daily Show [iTunes Link] in the iTunes Music Store, though they still do not contain any available episodes. The sale of these shows is being handled a bit differently. You can buy a "multi-pass" for both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show for $9.99US. This gets you the current episode, and sets up iTunes to automatically download future episodes as they become available (up to 16 episodes). Think of it as a paid podcast.
