Daily Show and Colbert Report RSS Feeds for iFilm

When Viacom pulled its clips from YouTube, they began posting them at Viacom-owned iFilm. While iFilm has complete sets of clips from every episode (DS and CR), they do not offer RSS feeds. So, using Dapper and Feedburner, I pulled together these two feeds:

Daily Show Clips on iFilm (http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyShowiFilm)

Colbert Report Clips on iFilm (http://feeds.feedburner.com/ColbertReportiFilm)

Currently there are only clip titles, no descriptions or dates, but it seems to work well. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: colbert report, colbert report rss feed, daily show, daily show rss feed, ifilm, rss feeds

Update 2: Thanks again for your comments grim. MotherLoad recently improved their video hosting and support embeds now. So, I've switched over to it. iFilm's performance was actually slower than MotherLoad with the new service. Stay tuned for some enhanced features and links on the clip pages.

Update: Thanks for your comment grim. I did switch the content of the feed today to pull in captions. And for the time being, it does have extra header info. I'll get this fixed soon. Airing dates may not be as trivial but I should be able to put posting date. Also, if you haven't yet, check out The Daily Show News blog

Comments

[Prasenjeet]

Official RSS feeds are also available from Comedy Central (although they do open in a popup window):

http://www.comedycentral.com/rss/tdsvideos.jhtml
http://www.comedycentral.com/rss/colbertvideos.jhtml

[Jeff]

The problem with the Comedy Central videos were summarized here:
http://unreasonable.wordpress.com/2006/10/28/comedy-central-makes-youtube-remove-colbert-and-daily-show-videos/

1. You have tiny little videos that can’t be resized. It’s like watching TV from the next room through the keyhole of a closed door.
2. You use javascript to launch a popup window. Therefore, I can’t send a link to my friends or put a link on my blog to direct people to the video highlight I want them to see.
3. Your popup window can’t be opened in a tab or resized. Give me control of my browser back.
4. Your popup window has an obnoxious background that I’m afraid is going to give me a seizure.
5. Next to your video, there’s an ad that’s bigger than the video. Firefox blocks it, but I can’t decide which is worse: the hole that remains in the background, or the background.
6. When I open a YouTube page, the video starts to play. Isn’t that cool? On your page, I sit and think about how much you suck while the video buffers. The video plays for about 3 seconds until it over-runs and starts buffering again. …and that’s with DSL. It must be completely useless at slower connection speeds.
7. With YouTube, I can embed the videos in my own website. When I visit a site I’m more likely to watch a video if its right there and I can just push play. You’re at least five years away from developing that technology.
8. YouTube’s search feature also works, conveniently allowing me to find what I’m looking for. At your site I end up looking through a list of videos.

[nex]

many thanks! i so totally owe you one!

[h2g2bob]

UnPlug will let you download from Comedy Central when the next version (1.6.03) is uploaded.

[dan]

this project merges RSS feeds and can import stuff from youtube and make it itunes friendly.

http://code.google.com/p/castcluster/

[danb]

Thanks! those will be nice when my appletv gets here.

This project makes RSS feeds from YouTube videos.

http://code.google.com/p/castcluster/

[Austin]

Any way to limit the number of entries? The LiveBookmark menu in FF is ridiculously long.

[Jeff]

Sorry Austin - neither Dapper or Feedburner allow this. If I decide later to write code to eliminate the Dapper piece, I'd be able to do it. Maybe Firefox has a setting for you.

Or use bloglines.com.

I'm really surprised Feedburner doesn't let you set a max number of titles.

[GrimPil]

I've been using your RSS feeds since this posted. Noticed that you modified them yesterday to grab the show titles as well. As a FF user, I'd recommend that you don't include the show name in the titles but include the airing dates instead (if its easy/possible). Including the name of the show when it's always the same show (especially if it's long like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart") is somewhat unnecessary and hard to read.

And thanks for the feeds. I utterly despise the Comedy Central player and the iFilm videos are much better to deal with, even if they do post later.

[GrimPil]

Just noticed that The Daily Show iFilm feed now links to videos that you're hosting on NewsCloud, while the Colbert Report feed still links to iFilm. If the change was intentional, I'd like to throw in my vote for (eventually) reverting to the iFilm-hosted videos. Their player is nicer to deal with than the MotherLoad player and it seems to me that the "DailyShowiFilm" feed should, by virtue of its name, link to iFilm.

That being said, I appreciate the push to embed these videos on NewsCloud. While I imagine that this move partly aims to grow the site's userbase, it does make more sense to have these shows viewed alongside related news stories rather than videos of car crashes. It's just unfortunate that the iFilm player can't be embedded instead of the slow-loading MotherLoad player.

On an unrelated note, thanks for the link to the Daily Show blog. I didn't know it existed earlier and it's a useful companion to the show.

[GrimPil]

I agree with your reasoning behind choosing to embed from MotherLoad (though I think they've offered embedding for a while now - since before I discovered your feeds).

Wouldn't creating new feeds for the NewsCloud pages make more sense, though? The 'DailyShowiFilm' and 'ColbertReportiFilm' feeds could link to iFilm videos, as they claim to, and you could burn new feeds (or a combined feed) for the NewsCloud videos. Re-using the feed seems unnecessary and takes away choice.

Also, now that you have control over the pages that contain these videos, do you think it might be possible to put together a rudimentary playlist feature for each day's show? It makes sense for Comedy Central to break videos up so that bloggers could embed/recommend certain sections, but I think the vast majority of the people using your feeds would like to see the shows in their entirety. Re-ordering the videos could potentially be time-consuming, but like everything else at NewsCloud, you could leave it to the users to arrange the playlist for everyone.

[Alice]

Great tip! Btw, have you looked at Feedity ( www.feedity.com )? Its like Dapper but much simpler at creating custom RSS feeds. Chao :)

[Whistler]

Nice post. I think that YouTube is great!

[Stephen U]

Comedy Central is now blocking their videos from Canadian IP addresses. This rss feed no longer works north of the border.

One is automatically redirected to thecomedynetwork.ca, which SUCKS - very slow.