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The Media Equation

‘South Park’ Marches On in New Places

 A scene from "South Park."Credit...Comedy Central

While the media moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho, jockeyed for parking spaces for their jets and hunted for havens in a consolidating content world, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the boy-men behind “South Park,” were in Los Angeles, proving again that if you make content people love — it’s harder than it looks — it doesn’t matter how many paradigms shift.

Onstage with Hulu at the Television Critics Association’s twice-yearly convention on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker announced a three-year deal that gives the service exclusive rights to stream the huge back catalog of “South Park,” which now consists of more than 240 episodes, as well as the current season’s episodes immediately after they are broadcast on Comedy Central. (Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone will continue to stream 30 selected episodes on their own site and host new episodes there, too.)

The deal, worth in excess of $80 million, according to a person involved in the negotiations, means Kenny and the boys will continue to frolic for years to come. It also points to a couple of broader trends that the titans at the gathering in Sun Valley might want to put on their agendas. (The actual creators of content have rarely been a big part of the guest list.)

First and foremost, high-quality content is only going to become more expensive as additional platforms open up. Content, we were told, wanted to be free. Turns out, it wants to be paid at every turn.

“Content came out of its hole, saw its shadow and ran back down the hole for protection,” Mr. Stone said over coffee in New York last week. “What we do is expensive, it takes a lot of people, and it makes sense to put it through windows in a way that produces a lot of value. We do what we do because we act like we own the stuff and try to surf whatever wave is out there.”

With Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo and others seeking to build noncable services that are part of the living room, leverage accrues to content makers with track records of garnering big audiences over time. Syndication, once a television backwater, has blossomed across platforms. A lot of buyers are desperately looking for content to fill the stream and encourage subscriptions, which means it’s turning into a costly gunfight.

In the past, much of the “South Park” archive has been available all over the place — on basic cable, syndicated on ad-supported television, on Netflix, on SouthParkStudios.com and on Hulu. Now, as competition has heated up among companies that provide programming over the web, exclusivity matters.

Hulu, which offers a mix of free, ad-supported programming and a pay premium service, can use “South Park” to attract young males, a tough demographic to reach. It is a marquee acquisition that will bring luster and attention to the original programming Hulu is beginning to produce and the rest of the catalog it streams.

Hulu, which underwent an identity crisis, seems to have stabilized as it looks for a sweet spot between Netflix and traditional television. Last year, it topped $1 billion in revenue, and it now has six million subscribers to its Hulu Plus premium service.

“This is a tent pole that will help us cut through the clutter; it’s a great deal for both of us,” said Craig Erwich, head of content at Hulu. “We have a great user experience, and we already know how popular the show has been with our viewers based on data we already have. This is a deal for all of the people who have ever watched ‘South Park.’ And that’s a lot of people.”

New episodes of “South Park” will now go through many windows — on television on Comedy Central, on the web at SouthParkStudios for viewing on mobile devices and computers, and now through streaming on Hulu.com and Hulu Plus.

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Trey Parker, left, and Matt Stone at Hulu’s presentation for a Television Critics Association event.Credit...Jonathan Alcorn for The New York Times

The durable appeal of “South Park” is also a reminder to the rest of the industry that playing nice with a show’s fan base helps. Since it was first broadcast in 1997, “South Park” had been pirated, parodied and knocked off. Through it all, Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker never played hardball, instead concentrating on new platforms and making sure that “South Park” was waiting when those new ways of watching opened up. For a while, that meant a ubiquitous presence supported by advertising, but now that noncable services are on the rise, much of “South Park” is headed behind a wall for streaming.

The pair are in this position because they never gave up creative custody of their work. They found a willing and committed partner in Comedy Central, a division of Viacom, and have moved opportunistically through a number of evolving epochs in the media business. And rather than try to build a huge empire as executive producers of random projects, Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker have fundamentally remained creators and are picky about new endeavors.

They made several movies, including “Team America: World Police,” and then turned to Broadway with “The Book of Mormon,” which has grossed a mind-boggling $500 million in the last three years. The pair recently completed a video game called “Stick of Truth” (don’t ask if you don’t know) that has drawn nice notices and was used by the makers of the Oculus Rift virtual reality glasses to show the potential of the new technology.

And rather than leap from project to project based on permission from various media companies, last year they worked with the Raine Group, an investment boutique, to form Important Studios, valued at over $300 million. With access to that kind of capital, the pair can self-finance their own initiatives.

Distribution, which used to dictate everything, has become commoditized, and it is content that is now precious. Netflix was unhappy Viacom made a deal with Amazon for Nickelodeon shows, but Netflix is no longer the only game in town. And while YouTube and others suggested to Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone that traditional television was a thing of the past, the “South Park” creators said that the partnership with Viacom had been a great one, and valuable to boot.

“Trey and I are in a unique position because we share ownership, so we have been privy to meetings where artists aren’t usually invited,” Mr. Stone said. “When we talked to people from Silicon Valley, it was like meeting with Martians who were telling us that they were taking over and our way of life was basically over.”

Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone seem to have threaded the needle nicely between legacy media and digital disruption, partly by being available on all kinds of platforms all over the globe.

“We love that Hulu has two sources of revenue — advertising and subscriptions — and that they were willing to work with us to make sure that the new stuff was always available to fans,” Mr. Stone said.

Hulu will provide both the video and the advertising, replacing a sometimes balky viewing experience with a smoother one that plays well on the phone, tablet, computer screen and television.

Speaking by phone, Mr. Parker said he did not exactly listen closely on business conference calls, but that the fundamentals had not changed: Make a funny show and media companies will write you a check.

“When we do those meetings with the suits, all I really care about is whether our fans have access to the body of work,” he said. “I can remember back when we did a deal with Rhino Records to put our stuff on VHS tapes and I thought, ‘This is it. What we made is going to live forever.’ ”

Give or take the VHS part, he turned out to be right: In the last 17 years, the boys of South Park have made the trip from the naughty corner to cable television to VHS to syndication, then on to movies, the web, streaming services, and now a video game. Life is pretty good when you never grow up.

Email: carr@nytimes.com; Twitter: @carr2n

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘South Park’ Marches On in New Places. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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