On Thursday, the Comedy Central cable TV channel owned by the Viacom Inc. announced that they have renewed political satirist Jon Stewart contract for his award-winning newscast “The Daily Show”. The deal will keep the show on the network through 2010. Financial terms of Stewart’s renewal were not disclosed.

Since its 1996 launch, the show has had two hosts: Craig Kilborn until 1999 and after that Jon Stewart. The latter is also its executive producer and writer.

Jon Stewart show accounts about 1.5 million viewers, a small number in television standards, but its popularity remained stable especially among young viewers. In a 2004 poll by the Pew research center for the People and Press, 21 percent of respondents, aged between 18 and 29, appointed the Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show’ and NBC’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ as regular sources for their political news.

Also, according to Comedy Central, eight years of the show with Jon Stewart as its host are available free, from today, on thedailyshow.com. 13,000 videos are fully searchable online through a system of tags and can be used also by the show’s producers and writers. This video archive is part of the MTV strategy to create branded Web sites for popular shows.

Mr. Flannigan, the executive vice president of digital for MTV Networks Entertainment Group  said: “With a show that’s as deep and rich and such a part of the American zeitgeist as ‘The Daily Show,’ just having it live as a section of ComedyCentral.com doesn’t do it justice”. He also announced that videos from the Craig Kilborn era of ‘The Daily Shoe’ will be added to the site in the first part of the next year.