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

Eero’s New Wi-Fi Routers Are Step One In Its Plan To Become A Smart-Home Giant

The early support for Thread may even hint at where Eero is going next. Tom Kerber, an analyst for Parks Associates, notes that one of the main features of Thread is that it’s decentralized. Instead o...

TV antenna use surges amid coronavirus outbreak

That’s according to Parks Associates, which said that 25% of U.S. broadband households use an antenna to watch local broadcast TV channels, up from 15% in 2018. The firm said those figures could incre...

Sharing your TV streaming passwords? Cable companies won’t stop you—yet

Neither of these methods work particularly well, at least for the kind of casual sharing that’s pervasive among friends and family members. A survey earlier this year by Parks Associates found that 18...

Comcast and Charter face a grim new reality: actual competition

“Across the nation, all sorts of internet service providers have gained two new competitors,” says Kristen Hanich, the research director for Parks Associates, referring to T-Mobile and Verizon. “They...