Big Bird, meet Tony Soprano, Stringer Bell and Daenerys Targaryen; “Sesame Street” is coming to HBO.
The premium cable network known for its lineup of very grown-up shows made a huge play Thursday into children’s programming, securing the rights to bring the next five seasons of the venerable kids series to its cable and streaming services, starting this fall.
The surprising move makes a lot of sense for HBO, which immediately bolsters its streaming services, HBO Go and the fledgling standaone HBO Now, with a show that children are increasingly watching on-demand.
“When we had an opportunity to put an iconic show like ‘Sesame Street’ on the network, we jumped on it,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler told the Wall Street Journal.
PBS, which has aired “Sesame Street” for 45 years, will still get the new episodes, but must wait nine months after they debut on HBO. While no financial terms were announced, the deal will pay off handsomely for Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization that produces the show. It will produce 35 new hour-long episodes a year rather than the current 18 — which PBS was planning to cut to a half-hour each — as well as two educational spinoff shows. HBO also gets the rights to 150 past episodes of “Sesame Street,” as well as about 50 episodes of the shows “Pinky Dinky Doo” and “The Electric Company.”
“Sesame Street” will continue to air on PBS this fall, with re-edited, older episodes.
Netflix and Amazon appear to be taking the biggest hit. Both streaming services will lose their rights to “Sesame Street” when their contracts expire later this year. An estimated two-thirds of “Sesame Street’s” viewing audience now comes from streaming services, rather than from PBS, the New York Times reports.
Children’s programming has emerged as a major battlefront in the streaming-video wars, with Los Gatos-based Netflix and Amazon fighting to win licensing rights for kids favorites such as SpongeBob SquarePants, Dora the Explorer and Pokemon. The reason is simple: As anyone with young kids can tell you, they like to watch their favorite shows over, and over, and over, and over, whenever they want. Offering an appealing lineup of children’s shows not only gets parents to subscribe to the service, it wins the hearts and minds of the next generation of consumers.
Sesame Workshop recognizes the changing media landscape as well. The bulk of its funding comes from licensing and DVD sales — and streaming TV is making DVDs obsolete. “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,” Joan Ganz Cooney, co-founder of “Sesame Street,” said in a statement, Variety reported. “In order to fund our nonprofit mission with a sustainable business model, Sesame Workshop must recognize these changes and adapt to the times.”
Sesame Workshop CEO Jeffrey Dunn said children will end up the biggest winners. “The partnership is really a great thing for kids,” he told the New York Times. “We’re getting revenues we otherwise would not have gotten, and with this we can do even more content for kids.”
At top: “Sesame Street’s” Bert, left, and Ernie are seen in New York. (AP Photo/Beth A. Keiser, File)
