For “Sesame Street,” a new road leads to HBO.
The Time Warner pay-cable service said it would license the next five seasons of the venerable program, which has taught preschoolers for decades about numbers, letters, emotional development and the joys of a rubber duckie. The series has become a mainstay of the American cultural experience, and has often served as one of the first pieces of video entertainment experienced by the nation’s tykes.
“Sesame Street” will still appear on PBS, which has aired the program since 1969. But new episodes will first appear on HBO, and then be provided to PBS after nine months. It was disclosed yesterday that PBS would run only half-hour episodes of “Sesame Street” in the fall, as opposed to a full hour – which has been the norm for years.
Under the pact, Sesame Workshop, the producer of the series, will also produce a “Sesame Street Muppet“ spinoff series for HBO, and develop a new original educational series for children. HBO will also license approximately 50 past episodes of two other series from Sesame Workshop: “Pinky Dinky Doo,” an animated program focused on literacy, and “The Electric Company,”a 2009 reboot of a series that was another PBS hallmark.
The move is certain to raise eyebrows: Should Grover, Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus be placed behind a paywall? At the heart of the transaction, however, are radically shifting dynamics in the way kids consume video and the manner in which companies get paid ror them doing so.
PBS has for years funded only 10% of the series’ production. The rest was provided by Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization once known as Children’s Television Workshop, and that money was typically secured through licensing, of course, but also from revenues associated with the sale of DVDs. In a world where more kids are accustomed to accessing their video favorites through streaming video and subscription on demand services, those monies had become crimped.
“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,” said Joan Ganz Cooney, co-founder of “Sesame Street,” in a prepared statement. “In order to fund our nonprofit mission with a sustainable business model, Sesame Workshop must recognize these changes and adapt to the times.”
For HBO, acquisition of the program and other content from Sesame Workshop is key in its push to establish itself not only as a premium video outlet distributed by cable and satellite providers, but also as a stand-alone broadband service that vie for subscriber dollars with rivals like Netflix and Amazon. Kids’ content is one of the biggest drivers of consumers picking up subscription-video-on-demand services. HBO also runs a cable outlet devoted to kids and family programming that is typically bundled with its flagship network.