“The Daily Show” could soon return to Hulu, the premier Web site for television viewing.
The show and its counterpart on Comedy Central, “The Colbert Report,” were removed from Hulu in early 2010 when the two parties could not agree on a fair price for distribution.
But executives at Hulu and Comedy Central negotiated about restoring the shows as recently as last month, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks.
Both sides were eager to make peace, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to imperil the talks.
Hulu gave the shows — and their hosts Jon Stewart, below right, and Stephen Colbert — a prominent online platform, and the shows gave Hulu an enormous amount of topical video, about 140 hours a year.
The sides came to an impasse last March, and Comedy Central removed the shows.
Comedy Central was said to have insisted on an upfront payment for the shows, citing their so-called halo effect — the notion that the shows draw new users to Hulu who then remain to watch more shows.
Many Hulu users voiced their disappointment about the situation, as did Hulu itself. Hulu’s future hinges in large part on its ability to maintain and expand its deals for programming.
“The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” remain available in full on Comedy Central’s own Web sites, but because Hulu is an aggregator of video with 30 million monthly users, the shows had the potential to reach a wider audience there.
It is unclear whether either company has changed its position about upfront payments. Representatives for Comedy Central, which is part of Viacom, and Hulu, which is jointly owned by several television networks and a private equity firm, declined to comment on the negotiations.
But the people with knowledge of the talks said Hulu had something to offer that it lacked last March: a monthly subscription service called Hulu Plus that supplements the free shows that most people watch on the Web site.