The widespread "piracy" of the Spirit Of Christmas short is what made South Park as popular as it was, early on.

Because people want to see the stuff right now. Southpark example, they don't upload the latest episodes right away

In my experience it takes a day. I don't think torrents could top that, even if they tried.

I really think South Park gets it. 24 hours after a new episode airs, they put it online. That's pretty damn reasonable.

Not really...shows like that, people want to discuss with others. If you have to wait 24 hours for the show to be upped, you miss out on all the watercooler talk the next day.

If torrents can up a show within 20 minutes, surely the show's creators can do it as well. If you are upping the thing anyways...I see no reason why your fans should have to wait an extra day.

If they could put it on the internet while they're airing it on TV that would certainly be the best.

Still, I give them great credit.

remember - some of us might be waiting months to see those shows on regular TV.. getting them within 24 hours of first screening is amazing for us.

agreed with the main point though

Hulu used to take a day (or maybe the whole weekend) to post Battlestar Galactica. Pirate Bay would take only a few hours, and would have it in HD, too.

The last five episodes of the series were delayed a week. I can't begin to understand how that seemed like a good idea.

There are multiple decisions Hulu (and more importantly their owners) are making that really don't make any sense.

There's one reason: flash. When we get a good video standard over the web, then yes, there's one less reason to pirate stuff like that.

Why isn't Flash H264 good?

One reason is that the Linux version of Flash is terrible last time I used it. Not even from a "open web principles" or "proprietary software is evil!" point of view, but rather in a "it crashes the browser on every 2nd or 3rd video viewing" perspective.

Also, I think Flash on OSX buffers more slowly than on Windows. It's why whenever I want to see something online I have to reboot into my Windows partition, where the video almost never has to stop to buffer. On OSX however, buffering for several minutes only leads to about 20-30 seconds of the actual video being loaded.

I've never had that problem and have used Flash video on Mac OS X for years.

I don't get that, at least on 32bit Ubuntu at home, although I hear people have a pretty crap experience. Have always found it pretty stable on Fedora / Ubuntu for the last decade actually - I get the feeling they do all their testing on major distros only.

However we've just moved to 64bit Linux Flash 10 alpha on RHEL at work - which I suspect might change my impression. It has Z axis issues at least which the current 32bit one doesn't.

Run it in nspluginwrapper, so that when Flash crashes it doesn't take down the browser. You just have to refresh the page for the Flash object to run again. Flash crashes less than once a day for me, and I use Flash a lot.

actually, the version on the southpark site is higher resolution than the torrents, the only issue i've had is that the content delivery network stutters enough that dowloading yields a better quality of experience

You can stream using whatever media player you like. We already have good video standards, it's just that people don't like dealing with their native video player and websites somehow feel that streaming Flash is easier.

The only thing that bothers me about their site is that every advertisement is the same and often just sucks. I'll take one of those annoying Sonic commercials, but seeing them over and over somewhat grates my nerves. It's a small price to pay though, since the ads are very short themselves and the video quality is good.