Paramount Global memory holes its various brand websites

The Future. Paramount Global has surprisingly deleted decades worth of content — show reruns, articles, etc. — from its brands’ websites. It just goes to show that nothing on the internet lasts forever. The move rings back to Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney canning movies and shows last year to help their balance sheet, which could spark a revolution to collect physical media once again.

Clip catastrophe
If you were hoping to watch an old clip of The Daily Show, you better hope it’s on YouTube.

• Over the past few days, the entertainment conglomerate has cleared the sites for MTV News, Comedy Central, CMT, Paramount Network, and TV Land of all their content (BET, Nickelodeon, and VH1 were still active, and MTV.com still had some videos).
• The sites now redirect people to check out that content on Paramount+… or through their TV provider for those who haven’t cut the cord yet.
• The problem is that Paramount+ has only a fraction of the content that was on these sites. For example, the streamer only carries the two most recent seasons of The Daily Show, while the oldest clip of the show on YouTube is from 2016.

The deletions come in the wake of Paramount’s new co-CEOs (George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins) announcing their ambition to cut $500 million in costs. Those savings are expected to come from the sale of various assets, layoffs, and apparently, gutting the digital archives.

Or as former Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood, Jr. posted on X: “Gotta bring back the bootleg DVD man.”