What’s that? You have so much time that you’d like to watch the entire clip? No problem (unless you live outside the U.S. or are watching this on certain mobile devices):

Spoiler: Jon Stewart does not bring up Drunk Nate Silver in this interview, and neither does Nate Silver. It’s still good, though. And Silver does swear here, and Stewart sort of does a Buzzed Nate Silver at the end. So it’s close:

And since we’re all here, let’s use the opportunity to get a teeny bit wiser, by reading Felix Salmon on Nate Silver — it’s not the math, it’s the words.

UPDATE: Silver, or someone who looks very much like him, has been spotted wearing a wizard’s hat at a Chinese* restaurant. Still sober, reportedly.

*”Asian”, technically.

Skewering its mainstream media competition, correspondent John Oliver helped kick off the show’s coverage, appearing with an iPad strapped to each arm while pointing at several other flatscreen displays.

From there, he read an “actual tweet” from an “actual person” who said they voted for Mitt Romney. And, if that tweet was representative of all Americans, then, he concluded, clearly Romney would win.

“That just happened, moments ago and I’m explaining it to you now in real time,” Oliver told host Jon Stewart, before moving the tweet to a larger screen. “There is no denying that tweet is now physically bigger.”

He then took a picture of himself, posted it to Instagram and to the show’s Tumblr page.

“Don’t tell me cable news is not alive and kicking,” he said.

She’s been without power since Monday night, when a Con Edison electrical transformer exploded near 14th Street. The latest estimates from ConEd say power will return to the affected areas on Friday or Saturday. That meant our Hurricane Sandy experiences couldn’t have been more different. I rode out the storm with power and hot water, my apartment abuzz with an omnivorous selection of streams of information: TV, Internet, Twitter, Facebook, radio, a police scanner iPad app tuned to the New York Fire Department’s stream of communications. Her only indication of the storm’s progress was what she could see from her window: Violent winds buffeting a tree outside her apartment, the sight of an occasional police car passing by.

I recounted how, the day after the storm, the bars and restaurants were unusually lively for a Tuesday night, full of displaced “refugees” from downtown hotels relocated to uptown boutique hotels, and how I went barhopping with an up-and-coming Food Network personality I met by chance. She told me how she has been imposing on the hospitality of another friend, who lives a few blocks uptown, to take a hot shower and run a blow-dryer over her hair.

Manhattan has been divided into two cities: One with power, and one without. And while everyone has experienced a blackout or two in their lives, it is starting to take on a scary, un-Manhattan-like tone here. My friend talked of having witnessed attempted break-ins at the stores and apartments on her block. The only lights come from passing cars and police cruisers on constant patrol. While the NYPD has generally done a great job keeping order, residents still staying in the unpowered zone are a lot more fearful than they’ve ever been, especially at night.

I walked my friend home, partially because I wanted to make sure she got home safely, and partially because I was curious to see what it’s like in the unpowered Manhattan after dark. On the last corner before entering the dark, I saw a gathering of a half-dozen people inside the ATM booth of an HSBC bank, crowded around the available power outlets. Someone had brought a power strip, and the group was running shifts charging iPhones and notebooks to maintain their tenuous connections to a 21st century existence. (That blurry picture is one I took with Instagram.)

As we rounded the corner onto her darkened block it was like entering a different country. The light and civility of a block away turned instantly dark and menacing. I was nearly run over by a person out for an ill-advised run — he couldn’t see me, and I barely saw him before my friend pulled me out of his way.

We got to her home. Generators loudly running across the street lit — barely — the lobby, and only the lobby, of a large high-rise apartment across the street. Two other apartment buildings, one on the same block, the other on the next, were not lit at all. One looked to be about as high as 34 floors. Elevators don’t run in those buildings, so every time a tenant chooses to venture out, it becomes an athletic endeavor, first climbing down however many flights are involved, and then back up. It was impossible to tell how many of the apartments were still occupied, though a few showed signs of having been prepared for the darkness.

The other indignity that comes from a power failure in New York is that when the power goes, so does the water, if you live above the fifth floor. Electric pumps automatically fill tanks on the roof to provide water to the upper floors. When the power goes and the tank is drained, that’s it for running water until the power comes back. On that score, my friend is lucky. She lives on the third floor of a five-floor walk-up. She has cold water, but since it’s so dark, she can’t really tell what color it is. Mayor Bloomberg has assured us that city water is fine.

She went upstairs to an apartment lit only by flashlights. I walked around for a few blocks. I didn’t like it much. It was the first time in 16 years of living in Manhattan — the civilized crown jewel of what the crime statistics show is the safest large city in America — that I felt truly uncomfortable. Perhaps I let my imagination run a bit with the darkened urban terrain. Strictly speaking, I was probably no less safe than at any other time. But I didn’t want to push my luck. When I saw an available taxi, I got out of the dark zone as fast as I could. (Picture from Instagram again.)

I got home just in time to see Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” trying to find the humor in all this. It worked, sort of. Did I feel a little guilty laughing at his take on the Two Manhattans? I did. And so should you. But watch it, anyway, courtesy of Hulu:

(Image is a screen grab from the “Daily Show” video.)

Except for this one problem: Lots of people who wanted to see the show, which was available only over the Web, couldn’t watch.

The Rumble 2012 Web site seemed unable to process orders for many customers — the show charged $5 a head — and some of those who did get through reported other technical problems.

What happened? The only word from the “Rumble 2012″ production team was a tweet blaming “overwhelming demand.” But that shouldn’t fly in 2012.

Due 2 overwhelming demand, our servers have been overloaded. We apologize for any inconvenience and we’re working to resolve the issue.

— The Rumble 2012 (@therumble2012) October 7, 2012

The Rumble 2012 Web site, meanwhile, doesn’t indicate that anything is amiss. Instead it promises that you should be able to see a replay of the show “shortly.” It’s been saying that for more than 90 minutes. [Update: As of now -- 11:19 pm ET -- the site's streaming option still doesn't work, but I seem to be able to download the show as an MP4.]

At this point it’s worth noting that the production company credited for this event is something called Nox Solutions, which says it’s responsible for running Web sites for the likes of O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham. Perhaps if these guys try this again, they might want to work with YouTube, which was able to provide some 500,000 concurrent streams during the Olympics.

But to be fair, a quick Google search shows that lots of folks watched the show without much problem. I was one of them: I headed over to the site about 30 minutes in advance, handed over my credit card info and started streaming without a hitch at 8 pm Eastern. The site didn’t require me to provide any kind of password or log in, and the video quality was quite reasonable. And I have ordinary, frustrating/adequate Time Warner Cable broadband.

I will say this for the Rumble 2012 people: They seem to have done a good job at working with YouTube to prevent people from uploading clips from the show. Someone named “MISSUNIVERSEMEXICO” has put up a set of unwatchable screengrabs, but beyond that, this is the best I can offer. I assume it will go away shortly:

UPDATE: Here’s the whole thing, via a frustrated Roger Ebert:

But not this weekend. At 8 pm ET, you can watch Jon Stewart debate Bill O’Reilly, live from George Washington University. And as soon as that’s over, you can click over to YouTube, where Jay-Z is streaming the last show of his eight-night run at Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center.

Total cost: $5, which goes to Stewart and O’Reilly, who say they’ll give half their profits to charity. The Jay-Z show is gratis.

My only real beef is that it will be harder to get this stuff from your PC to your plasma than it ought to be. If you’re interested in doing so, you may still need some combination of cables and/or boxes, like Apple TV.

This kind of live Web programming used to be a big deal, but now it’s increasingly common. Part of that has to do with technical leaps the Web video business has made (more on that later), and part of it is that the cost/audience equation now makes sense: You can do these live events without losing money, and you may even make some.

My hunch is that we’re still a very long way from seeing any of the real tentpole live events — like awards shows and big sports events — move from TV over to Web-only streams. But Jon Stewart and Jay-Z aren’t exactly niche, either.

The first post-Robsten Affairmaggedon interview by “Twilight” star Robert Pattinson was exactly as awkward as you might imagine it would be.

As everyone in the world knows, Pattinson’s co-star and paramour, Kristen Stewart, cheated on him in living-color photos that have been splashed all over the place, after which she made a very public apology to him.

Like I said, awkweird! But Pattinson does have a movie — “Cosmopolis” — to sell.

Thank goodness, then, for “Daily Show” cable television show host Jon Stewart — no relation! — who dove right in with this line and some comforting ice cream: “We’re just a couple of gals … tell me everything!”

It is trending all over the place online, of course, as Twihards gorge on the painfully delicious celebrity scandal.

Interestingly, Pattison giggled a lot in the session, which is below:

Turns out you’re going to have to keep waiting for that. For a long time.

The feud between the pay-TV programmer and the pay-TV provider ended this morning, the way every single one of these disputes has: The pay-TV provider agreed to pay more for the programming, and will pass those fees on to its customers.

In this case, Viacom got a bump of more than 20 percent for its stuff. As Bloomberg reported earlier this morning, that means that CEO Philippe Dauman will get more than $600 million for his shows this year.

And because those fees will escalate over the course of a seven-year contract, that means the overall deal will be worth more than $5 billion, the programmer is telling Wall Street today. Which is why the company was perfectly content to take an estimated $14 million hit a week while its shows were off the air.

DirecTV can also claim victory, because it’s paying less than Viacom asked for originally. And Wall Street seems just fine with it for both companies, because the prices of their shares are basically flat today.

But weren’t other issues in play here, too, like digital rights and carriage for Epix, Viacom’s HBO-like service? Yes. But also, not really. At the core, this dispute was only about the money DirecTV will pay for Viacom’s shows. The end.

No one ever seriously talked about breaking up the bundles that make up the foundation of the pay-TV business — the ones that mean that people who want to watch Jon Stewart on Comedy Central have to pay for access to Country Music Television, too. Because those bundles work quite well for both sides. And if new would-be players like Apple want in, they’ll have to accept the bundles, too.

That model will continue to work until pay-TV customers actually stop paying for TV in significant numbers. Or, more likely, a couple generations of would-be pay-TV subscribers get out of college, and never get a pay-TV subscription.

But that’s a scenario that’s going to take quite a while to play out. And since deals like today’s pact last for seven years or more (the Disney/Comcast deal signed earlier this year goes on for a decade), it’s going to be very hard to change the status quo.

Jon Stewart came back from a two-week vacation last night and was in excellent form: There was a great recap on Mitt Romney’s Bain problem, a very funny interview with Louis C.K., and a scathing bit where he decried the stupidity of Viacom’s decision to pull its programming — including his show — off the Web.

Except, here it is. You can see the entirety of last night’s episode on the official “The Daily Show” site, and the same goes for Stephen Colbert’s show.

Viacom and DirecTV are still fighting over subscription fees, so it’s unclear what prompted Viacom to change its mind about the Web ban it instituted last week, or whether it will apply to other Viacom shows as well. I took a brief tour of other Viacom sites this morning, and found that I could see old “Jersey Shore” episodes, but was out of luck with “Teen Mom.”

But most of Viacom’s shows are in reruns right now, and Colbert and Stewart are two of its most important online properties. So if it has called off the ban for those guys, it’s kind of the same as calling off the ban.

Then again, the ban for Stewart and Colbert was never going to be particularly effective, since it wasn’t a Webwide ban, anyway: The shows were always going to be available on Hulu.

Or maybe, per Stewart’s suggestion, the Viacom brass was worried that in the absence of “Daily Show” episodes on the Web, its customers might find other distractions, like masturbation. Or books.

Update: Here’s Viacom spokesman Carl Folta with a sort-of answer:

You will remember that we never said we were taking all our full length episodes down, just slimming down our offerings. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were on hiatus, so no recent programs were available. We know their fans have missed them — and sadly subscribers of DirecTV who have not yet switched distributors are still forced to be without all the Viacom networks they love — so we wanted to get them back on our sites as soon as we could.

But you can still watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert online, for free, without breaking the law: Just head over to Hulu, which has about a dozen episodes of each man’s show.

The discrepancy exists because Hulu’s expensive contract to re-air the shows doesn’t tie it to availability on Viacom’s own site. That’s a difference in Hulu’s basic agreements with its three primary owners — Disney’s ABC, News Corp.’s Fox and Comcast’s NBC — which means, more or less, that anything those broadcasters put up on their own Web sites also gets shown on Hulu.

But it’s hard to imagine that it’s going to matter a whole lot to most Colbert and Stewart fans, since most of them watch the shows within a day or two of their original air date. And both shows put out out their last new episode on June 28.

The two-week vacation ends on Monday, and if DirecTV and Viacom still haven’t settled at that point, then, in theory, the fight would be a boon for Hulu. But again, it will be more of a bummer for DirecTV customers, who will have been paying for access to shows they can’t see.

Meanwhile, if you just want to watch some Colbert and don’t want to open a new browser window, we’re happy to oblige. Here’s the June 28 episode, featuring the not-so-camera-shy Aaron Sorkin:

Stewart even got in a Lycos joke, but his real target was the softness of the federal government on all sorts of investigations.

Once again, Jon Stewart nails it perfectly on this “Daily Show” segment — and all at once, too, with biting commentary on Google’s new augmented-reality glasses, the $1 billion Facebook just forked over for Instagram and, yes, Mr. Handsome Devil, Ryan Gosling.

I wonder when they’ll be releasing that filter?

In all seriousness, a billion is a lot of money.

Enjoy:

By the way: I’d like to cite YouTube’s Tim Shey for pointing out Obama’s approach to email headers, because I think I saw him say that on Twitter recently. But, boy, oh boy, is it hard to search on Twitter, so I can’t confirm. Sorry, dude. Update: Confirmed!

The Huffington Post co-founder, who sold his site to AOL a year ago, is working on another Web news start-up. But Lerer isn’t trying to replicate his old site. Instead, he’s trying to create a digital video news operation built to attract a generation of Web natives who watch Jon Stewart but not CNN or Fox News.

People who have heard Lerer pitch the start-up say he has been vague about the details but broad about his ambitions. Here’s what I know for now, which doesn’t include the project’s name:

• The site/service is a joint venture between Lerer’s Lerer Ventures and Bedrocket Media, the video start-up that Lerer invested in last year.
• Lerer is telling potential investors and employees that he’ll be actively involved in the project, along with former HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau and Bedrocket’s Brian Bedol.
• The service, which will launch this summer in advance of the U.S. presidential elections, will use a mix of livestreaming video and taped reports, and a mix of professionally produced segments along with contributions from amateurs.
• While Bedrocket has landed four YouTube “channel” deals for its programming, the new venture won’t be confined to any particular platform. Lerer and company have been promoting the idea that the service will rely heavily on social media like Facebook and Twitter for distribution.
• The site/service has started hiring production/back-end staff but hasn’t brought in “on air” talent yet. When it does, it will likely look for relatively unknown reporters, not established/expensive TV folks.

There are plenty of other folks trying to figure out how bring TV-style news to the Web, including the TV people themselves. And Web sites that have their roots in “print” journalism are diving into video news, too. That formula usually involves positioning a couple reporters in front of a newsroom camera to discuss the day’s events (if you’d like to see me talk, for instance, I’ll be on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” show at 1 pm ET today). Interesting to see if Lerer and company can figure out a new take.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Daboost)

Something seems to have resonated with Jon Stewart and his “Daily Show” writers, who weighed in yesterday. Note that almost all of the footage they use in this one seems to come from a June 1, 2010, CNN report:

Author Walter Isaacson stopped by “The Daily Show” last night for what was basically a spoiler-free interview with Jon Stewart. Then again, if you’re reading this, you’ve likely hoovered up the book already, either in its entirety or via the excerpts flooding the Web.

Still, an entertaining seven minutes, touching on Jobs’s “Zen Stare,” the role of cosmic coincidence in the Apple co-founder’s story, and a requisite dig at Microsoft.

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Oh.

Bad news, LinkedIn. You led “The Daily Show” last night.

CEO Philippe Dauman said that a “substantial bump” in licensing revenue generated last quarter by the company’s TV shows came from “new and renewed digital distribution agreements” — i.e., deals with services like Netflix and Hulu.

The size of the bump may not be that big: BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield did some quick math and figured that new digital dollars added up to $70 million this quarter. That’s a tiny fraction of the overall $2.4 billion Viacom’s cable networks generated in the same time period.

But digital dollars are exceptionally profitable — Dauman said the margin on those deals was upward of 75 percent. And Dauman and his lieutenants took great pains to stress that they’d be signing up new digital pacts, both in and outside the U.S.

Unlike CBS CEO Les Moonves, who listed Apple, Microsoft and Google, among others, as potential buyers, Dauman was a little more circumspect when it came to new prospects — the only one he cited by name was LoveFilm, the “Netflix of Europe” that Amazon owns.

But he also suggested that some of the digital deals would come from cable and satellite companies who are already paying him to show stuff like “The Daily Show” and “Jersey Shore” on analog TV, but would want more digital rights. Both the Dish Network and DirecTV are obvious candidates there.

Again, this is the best-case digital scenario for the TV guys — the one where the Internet doesn’t eat into their business, but supplies it with new streams of easy money. It’s hard to believe it will stay that simple — a lot of this depends on customers deciding that it’s easier to pay for content than grabbing it for free off the Web – but right now it’s a pretty good place to be.

Bonus factoid: When this segment aired on the East Coast last night, @ladybigmac — whose profile describes her as a “political junkie that likes to watch golf and NASCAR races” — had 19 followers. As of 7:44 am, she has 1,397. She may not be aware of her newfound celebrity, though: She’s been tweeting to @cnnAM all morning, but has yet to acknowledge her national shout-out.

Except for the part about it not working.

On Aug. 15, Fox will stop distributing its shows on Hulu and Fox.com a day after they air, and will make most Web surfers wait eight days to see them. The only legal way around this, for now, is to pay for a subscription to either the Dish Network or Hulu Plus.

Expect ABC to follow suit, and then NBC. CBS is a reasonable bet, too.

I walked through the networks’ rationale for this last month, when word first got out that Hulu’s broadcast owners — Disney, Comcast and News Corp. — were going to start requiring “authentication” in order to watch shows online the next day. You can read an excerpt at the bottom of the post if you don’t want to click through.

The problem with the networks’ logic: Sidereel.com. And Sceper.eu. And Twitter. And Google. Etc.

All those sites will lead you, quite quickly, to anything the networks air, for free, on the Web. And you don’t have to wait eight days to watch them, or even a single day. You can see them within hours, or less, of their original airtime.

Video piracy is nothing new, of course. But if you haven’t tried watching a TV show from a rogue site recently (and I’m not advocating you do so for any reason other than a professional one — I don’t want a “Wolverine” incident) you might be astonished to see just how fast, and easy, it’s become.

As BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield pointed out to Wall Street earlier this year, it’s now a cinch to download pirated copies of any movie you’d like, in very high quality, using free online storage lockers.

But it’s equally easy to grab TV shows, and you don’t have to worry about downloads if you don’t want to clog up your hard drive: Sites like Videobb.com will offer free streams, without commercials, the same night they air on TV.

Here’s a screenshot of last night’s episode of “MasterChef,” available a couple hours after it aired on Fox (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.).

And here’s a grab of Tuesday night’s “The Daily Show,” which I was able to watch less than 30 minutes after it finished airing on Comedy Central.

Downsides? Sure. The streams aren’t HD quality — if you got it onto your 42-inch LCD, you’d be disappointed. And the sites seem to require Flash, so they won’t work on an iPhone or iPad. And you may still need a bit of trial and error to get a working version.

And they’re illegal, of course.

But again: They are free, totally serviceable, and very easy to find for anyone who’s remotely motivated.

That was the case before the Great Free TV Web Pullback of 2011, too. But back then (as in, now) if you were a middle-of-the-road TV and Web video fan, it was easy enough to head over to Hulu to watch last night’s “MasterChef.” You’d even put up with commercials.

Now Fox, and very likely the rest of the broadcast TV business, are telling non-pirates to go ahead and grab what they like, when they like. I think they’re going to find lots of takers.

—–

So why do the networks think this is a good idea? They probably don’t. But it’s a way to prop the business up in the short term, at the expense of the long run.

From my June 23 piece:

Why would Hulu’s owners push to make the service less attractive? The justification I’ve heard is that most Hulu viewers are paying for TV anyway, so this really wouldn’t be a big deal.

But the real answer is that this is meant to appease cable TV providers who are paying Hulu’s owners — via “retrans” deals — for the rights to provide the shows that Hulu is giving away on the Web. And it’s also meant to protect the value of broadcast TV advertising, since the ad business still doesn’t value a Web eyeball as much as one that watches on a TV.

Again, this is the kind of tension between business models that has been a problem for Hulu almost from the get-go. And it has been the source of many of the disagreements between Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and his owners for some time.

Still, Stewart did spend eight minutes on the story last night. Here he is on Rupert Murdoch’s visit to Parliament. And, of course, Wendi Deng’s pie-deflection.

Which segued to this bit on some News Corp. properties’ … restraint in covering the story.

And for good measure, here’s Colbert’s contribution from last night — a chat with the New York Times’s David Carr, who does most of the heavy lifting.

Includes shout-outs to Tumblr, Vimeo, bit.ly, YouTube, Groupon:

And here’s a TV network taking them up on the offer: Viacom’s Comedy Central, which is counting on Twitter to promote its “Comedy Awards” show tonight.

The network has linked up with the service before. Last month, for instance, it devoted on-screen real estate throughout its Donald Trump roast to hashtag terms it wanted viewers to use as they talked up the show on Twitter. Users who obliged ended up creating free, real-time advertising for the program.

Comedy Central plans to do the same thing with tonight’s show. But it’s taking the integration deeper by buying a “promoted trend” in advance of the broadcast.

Click through and you’ll end up at a page promoting the show, the network’s attempt to create an annual Oscars-style event (which was taped two weeks ago, a fact the network isn’t trying to hide: you can see the winners here). And if you end up on the site while the show is airing tonight, you’ll see a livestream of the telecast, along with a dedicated Twitter widget.

The network is hoping it will be able to get other related terms to trend–for free–as the day goes on; it has recruited about a dozen of the comedians that will appear on the show to actively Twitter about it in advance.

Twitter and Comedy Central were hoping to push the partnership even further by embedding a livestream of tonight’s broadcast on Twitter.com itself, alongside the “#comedyawards” page. But technical issues forced them to scrap the plan Friday morning.

Comedy Central isn’t relying solely on Twitter to push tonight’s show. It will simulcast the show on five other Viacom-owned channels, including Spike and VH1. And for good measure, it will stream the show to Apple’s iPad and iPhone, and handsets running Google’s Android.

But it’s most excited about Twitter, in large part because comedians themselves have flocked to the service in the last couple years. “It just seems like a natural fit”, says Steve Grimes, who oversees digital for the network.

Twitter is quietly excited, too. Even without the embeded video feature, tonight’s show gives it a chance to promote a cycle that would be particularly virtuous for Twitter: TV networks advertise on the service, get higher ratings, and can charge more for their own advertising. Repeat.