Stewart and Colbert come to Hulu

Wish you could watch The Daily Show and the Colbert Report without having to deal with Comedy Central's astonishingly clunky websites? Grateful for the heroic work of Crooks and Liars making clips available, but sometimes have a hankering to see a segment that they didn't happen to preserve?

Then good news is here: Viacom, parent of the Comedy Channel, has struck a deal with Hulu.com, the joint venture of NBC Universal and The News Corp. (which owns FOX) (got all that?), to make much of its content--including Stewart and Colbert--available online in free streaming full-episode format.

Execs at Viacom apparently took a solemn vow years ago to hound any clips of its own properties off of YouTube--which is why you can find, say, close to 2000 hits for "The West Wing" on YouTube but pretty much nothing for America's Anchors from Comedy Central except a lot of "content removed at request of copyright owner" messages.

You can also mark out custom clips to share on MySpace and Facebook--although I have yet to figure out how to get said clips into Blogger. When I finally get it figured out, you'll know.

One other limitation: At the moment, Hulu is only making the most recent dozen or so episodes of each show available. Not sure yet if this means that new episodes will push old ones off, or if they'll gradually build an archive library for viewers. Obviously, the latter is devoutly to be wished, but we'll have to see.

Hulu also has p3 faves Arrested Development, 30 Rock, and the first two seasons (so far) of Babylon 5.

(Image via Rolling Stone.)