Comedian's Bush spoof stays on iTunes Top 10
Comedian's Bush spoof stays on iTunes Top 10
By Noam Cohen. Copyright by The New York Times
MONDAY, MAY 22, 2006
The after-dinner speech that refuses to go away has scored another distinction: top of the charts.
An audio version of the roast of President George W. Bush by Stephen Colbert of the Comedy Central cable channel rose to the rank of No. 1 album at Apple's iTunes store Saturday, three weeks from the night of the White House correspondents' dinner at which it was delivered. Also in the Top 10 were new releases by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Paul Simon.
The audio version of Colbert's speech was delivered to iTunes through Audible.com, a company that provides audio content for downloading, including books, radio shows and shorter performances. It costs $1.95 to download. Neither C-Span nor Audible was able to say how many downloads there had been. Colbert was traveling and could not be reached for comment.
By many accounts, Colbert's performance landed with a thud among his influential audience of journalists and politicians, who were more overtly enthusiastic about a comedy routine involving Bush and a professional George W. Bush impersonator. But the broadcast of the speech is having a lucrative afterlife online, an unusual development for its owner, the nonprofit cable network C-Span.
This month, C-Span ordered more than 40 versions of the speech removed from the popular video-sharing sites YouTube.com and iFilm. C-Span said it had ordered the clips removed to assert its copyright on recordings of the performance, and shortly thereafter it allowed Google Video to stream it free of charge. In the two weeks since, it has been at or near the top of Google's list of most popular videos. Over the weekend, it was still No. 4 there.
C-Span said it owned anything that it filmed with its own cameras - that is, everything that appears on its three channels except what is said on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, where government cameras are used.
Now that another iteration of the performance, the Audible recording at $1.95 a download, is spreading among the public, C-Span, which was founded in 1979 and gets 95 percent of its financing from the cable industry, said it was uncomfortable with the impression that it was a commercially minded content provider.
The network said copies of a DVD of the event, priced at $24.95, had sold only in the "very low thousands."
By Noam Cohen. Copyright by The New York Times
MONDAY, MAY 22, 2006
The after-dinner speech that refuses to go away has scored another distinction: top of the charts.
An audio version of the roast of President George W. Bush by Stephen Colbert of the Comedy Central cable channel rose to the rank of No. 1 album at Apple's iTunes store Saturday, three weeks from the night of the White House correspondents' dinner at which it was delivered. Also in the Top 10 were new releases by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Paul Simon.
The audio version of Colbert's speech was delivered to iTunes through Audible.com, a company that provides audio content for downloading, including books, radio shows and shorter performances. It costs $1.95 to download. Neither C-Span nor Audible was able to say how many downloads there had been. Colbert was traveling and could not be reached for comment.
By many accounts, Colbert's performance landed with a thud among his influential audience of journalists and politicians, who were more overtly enthusiastic about a comedy routine involving Bush and a professional George W. Bush impersonator. But the broadcast of the speech is having a lucrative afterlife online, an unusual development for its owner, the nonprofit cable network C-Span.
This month, C-Span ordered more than 40 versions of the speech removed from the popular video-sharing sites YouTube.com and iFilm. C-Span said it had ordered the clips removed to assert its copyright on recordings of the performance, and shortly thereafter it allowed Google Video to stream it free of charge. In the two weeks since, it has been at or near the top of Google's list of most popular videos. Over the weekend, it was still No. 4 there.
C-Span said it owned anything that it filmed with its own cameras - that is, everything that appears on its three channels except what is said on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, where government cameras are used.
Now that another iteration of the performance, the Audible recording at $1.95 a download, is spreading among the public, C-Span, which was founded in 1979 and gets 95 percent of its financing from the cable industry, said it was uncomfortable with the impression that it was a commercially minded content provider.
The network said copies of a DVD of the event, priced at $24.95, had sold only in the "very low thousands."
posted by Carlos T Mock at 10:19 AM
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