Sesame Street will be finding itself at a new address soon. For the next five seasons, the long-running PBS children's series will no longer be aired on free TV, but on HBO, HBO Go and HBO on Demand.
This unexpected partnership will allow the production of the beloved children's series to step up its work. HBO will enable Sesame Street to increase its number of episodes from just 18 per year to 35. The deal with Sesame Workshop will also allow the studio to create a spinoff series.
But after 45 years of airing on PBS, the departure to join a premium pay-TV service has already drawn backlash. Critics on both ends feel that the switch will compromise the quality of educational TV that Sesame Street has brought to hundreds of children - especially for lower-end communities, which the series was initially targeted towards.
However, Sesame Workshop, which produces the series, continues to assure families that Sesame Street will still be made available on free TV.
According to the deal made with HBO, after nine months of the new epiodes airing first only HBO beginning this fall, they will be aired once again on PBS for non-subscribers to enjoy.
In the meantime, PBS will continue to air old episodes of the series, which will be edited to feel like new. Sesame Street has always aired a mix of old and new content in its episodes, which is especially beneficial to younger viewers for repetition and review.
Jeffrey D. Dunn, chief executive of Sesame Workshop, feels that the move is beneficial to all, including the children.
"No other media company believes that disadvantaged kids deserve the same shot as middle-class kids, and that remains important to us. We will have a couple of homes now. HBO will allow us to really capture the consumer shift, but we are not leaving linear TV," he says.
In addition to the re-airing of old episodes, Sesame Street will also still be available to stream on the website, PBSKids.org and on the PBS Kids' Video App.
The move to HBO will greatly help funding for Sesame Street since only 10 percent of its funding actually came from PBS. The rest came from revenue from sales of DVDs, which with the rise of online and streaming video, has been in decline.
The partnership will also help HBO recapture a younger audience as it has in recent years become known for more adult series full of profanity, nudity and other themes which push the limits of television.
Although others are afriad what losing one of their flagship projects might mean for the future of PBS, others say it might give the channel some much needed breathing room. Under the new deal with HBO, PBS will no longer have to pay licensing fees to air the new episodes of Sesame Street, which currently costs it $4 million a year.
In addition to securing Sesame Street for the next five years, as part of the deal, HBO has also liscensed more that 150 library episodes of Sesame Street and 50 old episodes of Pinky Dinky Doo and The Electric Company, also produced by Sesame Workshop.
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