The new season of South Park debuts tonight on Comedy Central, with a timely episode about America's fears that China will pwn us. A BB pal who's seen a few clips says it's sick; perhaps as gamechanging-ly great as Imaginationland. And as reported previously on Boing Boing, the show's new website offers fans the ability to view episodes in entirety online. You can also buy them in iTunes.
What hasn't been announced yet is this: The South Park guys have cooked up a killer iPhone application. It's not yet available in the iTunes App Store, but I visited the South Park headquarters recently for a sneak peek with Matt Stone (iPhone snapshot above) and the South Park digital team.
Full-size screengrabs follow after the jump.
The app functioned beautifully, with the ability to stream clips, grab wallpapers for your device, read news, and browse the complete episode index. Also: choose character likenesses as "contact images" for your iPhone — assign a face to the phone book entry of your choice. An incoming call from best friend displays Kyle or Cartman; your weed dealer medical marijuana dispensary is Towelie, and so on.
Some statsporn I gathered:
* The South Park website has had 134 million hits since launch in March. On an average day, the site receives 600,000 – 700,000 hits.
* When a new episode goes online, the website receives one to one and a half million hits in a day.
* There are nearly 300,000 registered users.
* 55 million full shows have been streamed since launch, the most-viewed episode being "Major Boobage" viewed 1.5 million times. The least viewed episode is "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics," at 94 thousand views, which I believe to be a crime against all that is good in the world because Mr. Hankey is awesome.
Other newly-launched goodies online that fans may enjoy:
* The Cult of Cartman
* Major Boobage Behind the Scenes
* Super Fun Time: Six Days to South Park
* And the South Park games page.
Speaking of games, there's unannounced news in the works on that front, too. More here on the blog, as soon as we can. Click onward for more iPhone app preview images. Release this thing already!
SOUTH PARK IPHONE APP: sneak peek screenshots
A footnote for gaming fans and ad biz followers: the first two episodes of the new season on Comedy Central feature 2-minute-long Ubisoft ads for the Shaun White Snowboarding, Prince of Persia and Farcry 2 titles. The idea is to show in-game footage for the new snowboarding game, rather than running "30 second spots that piss people off," according to a Ubisoft spokesperson (Adweek article).
(Special thanks to Matt Stone, and Todd Benson, Christopher Brion, and Mitch Halpin for the South Park Digital Studios tech tour; and to Jolon Bankey.)
