The Daily Show app: Everything but full episodes
Although you can watch complete segments on your favorite topics or starring your favorite correspondents or guests, you can't watch full episodes. Rats!
I'm a huge, huge fan of "The Daily Show." It's the single funniest thing on TV, and Jon Stewart is perhaps the smartest guy ever to sit behind a talk-show desk. (The less said about his interviewing skills, however, the better.)
Needless to say, it didn't take a lot of arm-twisting for me to grab the new The Daily Show app--especially considering that it's being offered free just for today. (I'm not sure what the price will be as of tomorrow, but we can look for clues in The Colbert Report's The Word, which costs $1.99.)
The app offers a lot for rabid fans like me, starting with a shareable quote of the day (and accompanying show segment) for roughly the last eight weeks' worth of shows.
Tap the Topics button and you'll see a spinning word cloud (or an alphabetical list if you switch views), with each item leading to handfuls--if not buckets--of clips related to that topic. These appear to date back as far as December, 2009--not the full archives by any stretch, but still plenty of stuff to watch.
Thankfully, all videos are commercial-free, at least for the moment. All you see is a brief Capital One graphic before each clip.
The Schedule button shows upcoming guests for at least the next few days, and the times each episode will re-air on Comedy Central the following day. (Wow, each one repeats four times. Who needs a DVR?) You can set reminders (15, 30, or 60 minutes) for any selected airing.
Finally, there's the Tweets button, which shows not only #TheDailyShow and #JonStewart hashtags, but also the tweets for the show itself and four correspondents (Aasif Mandvi, Olivia Munn, John Hodgman, and Kristen Schaal).
What's missing? Unfortunately, the one thing fans undoubtedly want most: full episodes. Great as it is to have access to complete segments (as opposed to, say, 30-second clips), it's not the same as being able to watch an episode start-to-finish.
Maybe that will come. In the meantime, The Daily Show app is still a must-have for "The Daily Show" fans, and today's the day to get it--while it's free.