Hot on the heels of its [YouTube waffling][1], Comedy Central has announced it will be revamping its online video distribution.

According to [The Hollywood Reporter][2], the new site plans on "offering a syndication capability allowing users to grab and embed their favorite clips for posting on their own Web pages."

Hmm. That sounds like another site I've heard of.

The new site will also feature clips in Flash for better cross-platform capability (the current site shows .wmv movies).

The good news is that the Comedy Central website has no where to go but up. The current site is a disaster, the kind of site the haunts Jakob Nielsen's darkest nightmares

In researching this post, the current site managed to crash Safari three times and in Firefox produced a bizarre flickering effect and overlaid content on top of the menus. Hopefully these and myriad of other issues will be addressed in the revamping. 

It's nice to see Comedy Central trying to improve their site and reaching out to viewers wanting online content, but I can't help thinking that a partnership with YouTube might make more sense. I manage to watch The Daily Show almost every day and until today I'd never actually been to the Comedy Central site. I suspect that I am not alone in this. 

YouTube already offers a distribution network exactly like what Comedy Central claims they are building, why not use it? Comedy Central may be a destination channel on the dial, but that doesn't translate to a destination website, which is something corporate media companies fail to understand. The audience doesn't want all their Comedy Central video content in one place, they want *all* their video content in one place.

[Update: It would seem that the flickering effect I witnessed was actually due to an adblocking plugin. But hey, if you can't block the ads, what's the point in browsing the internet?]

[1]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/comedy_central_.html "Monkey Bites on CC and YouTube"
[2]: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/television/news/e3iBJfr5p%2BGfIe4f6SRiNPJ7w%3D%3D