Sesame Street Heads to HBO
Sesame Street has signed a five year deal with HBO. Here's what it entails.
Sesame Workshop is taking its talents to HBO. We'll spare you as many of the Game of Thrones, Deadwood, or Sopranos meets Sesame Street puns as possible in this article, because by the time I got around to writing it, the internet had already beaten that felt, googly-eyed horse to death and sent it to the glue factory.
The next five seasons of Sesame Street will air on HBO, and will also feature across other HBO platforms like HBO On Demand and HBO GO. It will continue to air on PBS, although new episodes will be exclusive to HBO for the first nine months. It's unlikely that your Sesame Street watching child would notice the lag, so I wouldn't worry too much about that, and reruns will continue to air unimpeded.
The nice part of this deal is that because of the deal with HBO, PBS stations no longer have to pay for Sesame Street. HBO has licensed 150 "library episodes" of Sesame Street. It might be neat to see what those episodes are, or if archival episodes from its early days will also be made available on their digital platforms down the road.
“I’ve long admired the creative work of HBO and can’t think of a better partner to continue the quality of Sesame Street’s programming,” commented Joan Ganz Cooney, co-founder of Sesame Street in a statement. “Over the past decade, both the way in which children are consuming video and the economics of the children’s television production business have changed dramatically. In order to fund our nonprofit mission with a sustainable business model, Sesame Workshop must recognize these changes and adapt to the times.”