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Sesame Street Moving to HBO. A Nail in the Coffin for PBS?
For the next five seasons, new episodes of Sesame Street will run first on HBO (and its online partners), then on PBS nine months later. As part of the deal, PBS gets the show for free.
So, is this 1) simply a creative funding arrangement for PBS; 2) a nail in the coffin for PBS’ very existence; or 3) best yet — and my personal opinion — yet more proof that PBS does not need federal subsidies to stay alive and stay “public”?
Published in Culture, EntertainmentFor those of you still scratching your head over this partnership, it makes perfect sense from a business perspective. Though Sesame Street received funding from PBS, that money amounted to less than 10 percent of the funding needed to produce the series. The remaining cash was procured through licensing revenue from DVD and merchandise sales. However, as more and more people turn to streaming and VOD services, fewer and fewer people are purchasing the physical media which used to be Sesame Workshop’s bread and butter. According to The New York Times, approximately two-thirds of children who currently watch Sesame Street do so on demand rather than watching on PBS. Naturally, if we want more Oscar the Grouch in our lives, Sesame Workshop had to find alternate ways of financing his high-rolling, trash-dwelling lifestyle.
That person wasn’t really your friend where they? ;)
Right Up HBO’s alley.
Are there bets on how long till we have muppet porn?
Sheesh.
Because it helps illustrate that PBS’ raison d’etre, that it was the only option for alternative and education programming, applies less and less with the development of every new distribution channel.
Maybe back when there were only three channels on the dial it made sense, but that paradigm died with cable.
Funny, it was exactly around the time of the digital conversion that I could no longer get the PBS signal at my home, about 35 miles from Philadelphia. Not even with the translator from analog…
You mean official Muppet porn, or will unofficial Muppet parody porn suffice?
I should have said, redundant dinosaur.
I’d like to think that the other networks don’t survive on my tax dollars.
well, that is all so beyond my ken–by that I mean my experience, not my barbie doll’s boyfriend. ;)
I have no doubt that HBO will have gratuitous LGBTTIQQ2SA sex scenes incorporated into the show in no time at all. Sesame Street makes a great vehicle to introduce children to the new hedonist world view of today.
Courtesy of Frank Soto…
Have any of you seen Jim Henson’s old TV series The Storyteller? It was often dark and more mature than The Muppets. It told folk tales, including stories of Death and devils.
It wasn’t bad. But I half-expect any puppet show from HBO to more closely mimic raunchy comedy animation like Archer and South Park. Ironically, Henson’s series expected more maturity even from child audiences.
When I was a teenager, my classmates considered HBO to be part of a set along with “Skinemax” and “Blowtime”.
I am afraid to click that link…
One reason the public TV “target” is so hardened to direct assault is the sheepish fact that so many of the local pork barrelers who steered subsidies to their rural areas are southern and western Republicans. More dough than you’d think is spent by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting bringing broadband to Oatmeal, Nebraska.
Does this mean we finally got Big Bird off of welfare? I have mixed feelings, because I had hoped for it to be one of the main campaign issues of 2016. Maybe it still can be, in a positive way.
It’s a song called “The Internet is for Porn” from a Broadway show called “Avenue Q.” The cast is mostly puppets.
Thanks for sparing me.
I certainly hope they address appropriate race, class and gender issues which are so sadly missing from most popular media.
(Actually, it’s inconceivable that there will be a single scene in which the Progressive Orthodoxy is not enshrined. Historical accuracy will be of little importance, and might even be an impediment. You realize, don’t you, that one of the central issues of the Civil War was the treatment of the interracial relationships between gay soldiers in their different segregated regiments?)
Here’s a press clip of a fairly clairvoyant event that Rob and I did ten years ago on “Finding the Future of Public Television”. You won’t be surprised that our fearless leader boldly declared that it didn’t have much of a future, which caused other, more mainstream panelists no end of distress. The 2005 predictions, described elsewhere as “worst case, right wing scenario” now look utterly normal. We had a good selection of unorthodox viewpoints.
Here’s some more about (ahem) my own organization’s TV activities. The PBS-CPB event is about two thirds of the way down.
Notice how carefully phrased everything is!
We are the only nation on the planet without an official state broadcaster. Our lone “official” broadcaster, The Voice of America, is prohibited by law from distributing its programming within our borders. (Although they are available on the web.)
In the Anglosphere, the state broadcasters are really quasi-public corporations that feed off of and compete with commercial broadcasters and each other.
The BBC has international sales of £1,042B ($1.63B USD) and still taxes the UK public to a tune of £3.735B ($5.8 B USD) per year through the TV License Tax. A good deal of that international sales come from other state broadcasters like the CBC and the ABC.
But all of these then sell to our PBS, cable networks and streaming services like Netflix and Acorn. My own position is that if they are going to compete commercially they have no right to tax monies.
Among other reasons.
And I bet their Internet ratings from within the US are through … the … ROOF!
;-)
The hardware led the software. The liberal Ford Foundation had a vision in the late Fifties, and it must be said they did everything right: they wanted America to create a BBC-style national TV network to compete with commercial broadcasting, and they wanted to make it out of the raw material of the country’s then-growing number of educational TV stations, many of them (naturally) affiliated with school systems or colleges.
Ford Foundation gave them the money to buy Ampex videotape recorders, which cost $110,000 at the time (EJ can check my math), and that became the method of interchanging programs: I’ll give you my tape of Prof. Doc Brown’s talk on the time space continuum, and you send me your tape of the Altoona, PA Shakespeare festival. Petty harmless stuff. It created a virtual network: they couldn’t go “live”, but they could try to arrange stations in Major markets to at least play some of the tapes on the same night, achieving most of the same national effect, far more cheaply.
Ford Foundation and the JFK/LBJ era bureaucrats wanted more. They wanted an “interconnect”, a true physical network connection like the Big Three had. They coordinated this with a good government-Ladies’ Luncheon Club campaign to win Congressional approval of the Public Television Act of 1967, an innocuous sounding document. That turned sleepy old NET, National Educational Television, into the trendy new PBS, which almost immediately became publicized.
They have some great jazz programming. But the end of the Cold War, the rise of the Internet and slide of shortwave broadcasting has certainly changed the way they operate.
Before the CPB was created, America’s commercial broadcasters believed they also had a higher duty. NBC had its own symphony orchestra. ABC was the home to National Geographic and Jacques Cousteau specials.
PBS freed the networks to program to the lowest common denominator at all times.
And don’t forget CBS’s Playhouse 90.
In our 2005 conference, former Universal and Columbia studio chief Frank Price (a conservative, BTW) revealed how and why in the late Fifties, he and other New York TV executives put up the money to buy the broadcast license of their weakest VHF competitor, tiny Newark, New Jersey-based channel 13. This would be a gift to the fledgling campaign to bring an NET affiliate to NYC (“It’s shocking! Shocking! That in a so-called free country, there’s no educational TV station in every city”–any easily irate intellectual.) At the last minute, cheapo ABC cut its offer in half, so haughty, “civic minded” CBS promptly did the same. Eventually some amazing slight of hand got WNET the money to go on the air around 1962.
The purpose of the high minded license purchase, of course, was to permanently eliminate one of only seven possible VHF slots so no future competitor could run commercial programming.
I believe our Southron brethren call this a “Baptist and bootleggers” coalition.
Your point is valid. Just to mention, however, that Downton Abbey is a joint project with WGBH in Boston. So is Sherlock, Masterpiece Theater, Mystery, and Poirot and Marple.
“Joint project” is a financial term. Creative control belongs to the BBC.
What I want to know is whether PBS will continue to receive the dollars that were equivalent to the 10% producing the series. They no longer have that expense of producing, also they are not having to pay any new licensing fees to HBO, therefore these two costs (old for producing and no new costs for licensing from HBO) have gone to zero. Unless they are planning to produce anything else new, those funds coming from the public dole ought to be cut. I didn’t see that addressed in the article at the link below.
Presumably, at nine months delayed rebroadcast the series has no worth to HBO to license. By then, a series DVD set would be available. Any earlier re-broadcast on PBS would eat into HBO’s marketshare and justify licensing charges. Nine months seems like a reasonable breakeven point.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/business/media/sesame-street-heading-to-hbo-in-fall.html?_r=0
maybe the DVD releases will be later than the release to PBS…
HBO-PBS-DVD. in that order.
I just want to know what parent is going to let their kid have access to the HBO channel to watch SS? I’d think that would be one of the channels locked with parental controls.
I don’t even know what is on HBO, but it is kind of scary to imagine kids watching Sesame Street with previews: “Up next, The Sopranos 7.0”.
I’m pretty certain The Sopranos would be a soft touch at this point.