South Park Studios (also known as South Park Digital Studios and sometimes informally SPS or SP.cc) is a television, film production and video game development company, which produces South Park and South Park-related media channel owned by ViacomCBS through its domestic network division's MTV Entertainment Group unit, based on the official South Park website hosted by Comedy Central and managed by the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The studio itself was founded in 2009 at Culver City, California (USA).
The current incarnation of the website includes clips from every South Park episode, a rotating schedule of free full episodes and sound downloads, an avatar creator, browser games, behind-the-scenes content, an official wiki, and the official South Park message board. Official news related to the show, including new episode press release information, are posted in the website's "Blog" section.
The website, or certain sections of the website, are unavailable in many countries, where localized versions of the website are available instead, such as southpark.cc.co.uk in the UK and Ireland.
History[]
The site's earliest incarnation (2001 - 2003) was launched before the premiere of the show's fifth season and was run directly by the team at South Park Studios themselves who created the show, run in a manner similar to many early and contemporary fansites. Content included trivia, new episode previews, air schedules, and exclusive behind the scenes information with the show's crew members. The site allowed for direct interaction with fans, including live chats with Matt and Trey themselves. At this stage, it was not yet officially endorsed by Comedy Central, who asked the site to remove Trey's full scripts for episodes from the show's first five seasons.
For its second incarnation (2004 - 2008) the site was re-designed heavily, featuring weekly posts about episode schedules and beginning the tradition of placing new episode information online every Sunday night before air with the ninth season. An in-depth Character Guide featured the original, rough 'Corel' character designs (used as placeholders in animation) as well as a popular production blog about the show's crew and a 'frequently asked questions' section. A new 'Downloads' section also included downloadable images and sounds from the show, as well as short QuickTime videos that included early episode 'previews', and the launch of a fully-integrated message board.
The site's third incarnation (2008 - 2014) has first launched for beta testing during the beginning of the twelfth season. The real star attraction was the integration of the Flash-based Viacom Media Player, which allowed hundreds of video clips to be hosted and streamed directly on the website and available for off-site embedding. In addition, for the first time, the website allowed fans to legally stream and watch every full episode of the show for free online; for thirty-day spans, it also hosted the complete film to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and the show's rarely seen Unaired Pilot was also featured for thirty days on one occasion. Brand new episodes would be hosted online for a week, including an uncensored version, before being removed for thirty days for unspecified legal reasons. Featured Video Clips were curated and rotated weekly.
Though best known for the free, full episodes, the site underwent a radical style design across the board, simplified to black backgrounds with golden yellow text headings, and a new style of images that often featured close-ups of various characters. Episodes were often represented by a close-up screenshot, while promotional icons featured them against single-color backgrounds, and extreme close-ups fit the new logo. The new Character Guide featured recurring characters in screenshots from the show with grayscale backgrounds to highlight them, alongside basic descriptions and tagged video clips. The browser games and production blog continued as before, and initially, new browser games, screensavers, and "Six Days to South Park" behind-the-scenes videos were also heavily featured.
The third incarnation remained consistent in style but the main page was revised around the early fifteenth season to focus on a slider and two or three simple icons instead of multiple squares, and behind-the-scenes features and browser games declined considerably around this time, and the character descriptions were no longer updated to reflect later episodes, though new clips were still tagged. The message board remained, however, and frequently asked questions continued to be answered.
In September 2013, the fourth incarnation initially debuted. Despite boasts of a new integrated Wiki and HD, uncensored versions of classic episodes from seasons 3-10, the design was highly incomplete, with some sections entirely inaccessible and multiple glitches. Due to fan outcry, the website reverted to the previous version for several months, and both options were offered upon visiting the site for over a year. The majority of the show's streaming library was still offered for free, full and uncensored, during this time.
The fourth incarnation was fully standardized in April 2014, now hosted at South Park.cc.com, alongside the announcement that beginning with the premiere of South Park's then-upcoming eighteenth season, the site would no longer offer the entire series for free streaming. A multi-year deal with Hulu meant that a rotating selection of thirty free episodes would be available on the site at all times, including brand new episodes, with the full streaming library being held behind the paywall of a Hulu Plus subscription. This decision was met with a huge outcry from fans expressed primarily via social media. A new, barebones wiki also debuted.
In late 2015, the long-awaited update to the Official South Park Studios BBS message board took place, re-integrating the message board into the site after over a year of being difficult to access, and restoring many features that had been lost over the years, such as allowing avatars to show expressions in individual posts and creating a stronger link between to the main site and message board profiles.
In September 2020, the site had a massive redesign and revamp, which followed the website being renamed from "South Park Studios" to simply "South Park".
Production Blog[]
From roughly 2005 until 2011, there was also a South Park production blog managed by staff and rotating through various crew members talking about the lives of those who work on the show, often updated the same time of week a new episode would air. While it rarely discussed South Park itself, it offered a rare look behind the Studio's doors and showed what the average crew member does during the production season. Though popular, it was discontinued for unknown reasons.
External Links[]
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