Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

A Muppet always pays his debts – Sesame Street finds new home behind paywall

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street, announced a programming deal that will send Sesame Street from its longtime publicly-subsidized home on PBS to the corporate Time Warner-owned home of Westeros on HBO. According to a press release from Sesame Workshop, the deal includes:

  • a five-year order of 35 episodes per season (nearly twice its current 18 episodes per season);
  • 150 library episodes;
  • a muppet-based spinoff series;
  • an additional educational series;
  • library episodes from Sesame Workshop-produced shows Pinky Dinky Doo; and,
  • 2009 reboot of the 1970s educational series The Electric Company.

New episodes of Sesame Street will begin airing on HBO as early as this fall.

Exact financial details of the agreement were not immediately released. On the surface, this looked like a surprise move. After all, aside from movies, HBO is known primarily for its adult-themed programs like Game of Thrones, The Wire, Girls, and True Detective because FCC governance is less strict on premium television. However, the move benefits both Sesame Workshop and HBO.

From the article "A Muppet always pays his debts – Sesame Street finds new home behind paywall" by Glenn Hower.

Previously In The News

Parks: Netflix Is OTT Leader In The US

Parks Associates announced OTT data showing that at the end of 2015, approximately 20% of US broadband households had cancelled at least one OTT video service in the past 12 months. In 2Q 2015, 18% ha...

Voice Recognition Software Drive New IoT Use Cases

“Over 70% of voice-recognition users are satisfied with the experience of using this solution on their smartphones, which is driving experimentation with this functionality on other platforms, includi...

Monetising OTT: The Key Factors

Speaking in a presentation at Broadband World Forum entitled Making money in the new world of video, Brett Sappington, he said that there had been a rush to OTT in the last few years. In the US, for i...

You don’t have to feel guilty about sharing your TV log-in

Last year, research firm Parks Associates found that 16 percent of U.S. households with broadband admitted either borrowing video log-ins or sharing their own credentials. For many people under 40, sh...