Viacom Pulling Colbert and Stewart From Hulu

The New York Times is reporting that Viacom will be pulling The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from popular online TV streaming service Hulu. The move is set to occur next week.

As the story goes, Viacom realized that a huge demographic of Hulu subscribers were watching both shows and they demanded a ridiculously large amount of money to keep the shows on the service. Rumors are also stating that they demanded an upfront payment for their programming.

In the meantime TheDailyShow.com and ColbertNation.com will continue to rebroadcast their shows past episodes. The deal, while not a big blow to Hulu, does show a big problem the company faces in terms of attracting third-party network providers to their service, companies which could help build the site into a major online player of digital content should they stay or come on-board.

With this recent jumping of ship by Viacom we expect to see a more viable pay model from Hulu in the near future or they could end up as nothing more than a wasteland for second rate programming. [Gizmodo]