Team Gives Away “South Park”

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creative team behind the groundbreaking cartoon series “South Park,” were just like everyone else. If they wanted to see their own toon on the Net they were forced to either pay for the episodes or go the illegal route. Well, they decided to come up with a solution that all “Park” fans are going to love….give the whole thing away – FOR FREE!

Fans no longer need to go to YouTube to find a snippet here and a snippet there of this seminal work in animation. They won’t have to shell out $1.99 (USD) an episode on some legal download site, now they can simply go to SouthParkStudios.com and get every episode of the series for nothing…nada…zilch. Every episode, from the first to the most current will be available at the site for downloading.

Here is how the system will work: Current episodes become available for one full week after airdate. Then after a month blackout of it, that episode is added to the full episode catalog. The site currently runs semi-uninterrupted, however, since Comedy Central is footing most of the cost of this little experiment, commercials will eventually be included.

Now, many may be thinking the boys are doing this just for the benefit of fans but there is also a legal reason behind the decision. Parker and Stone have been encouraged by Comedy Central to put as much space between themselves and YouTube as possible because Central’s parent company, Viacom, the mother of all entertainment congloms, has filed a lawsuit against Google owned YouTube for what it considers piracy of some of its video products, including episodes of “South Park.”

“We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time, so we gave ourselves a legal alternative,” stated Parker and Stone in a joint statement.