Time Warner Inc.’s HBO appointed Oscar the Grouch and Elmo to lead its children’s programming, part of an effort by the premium cable network to expand its audience at a time when fewer young people are watching conventional TV.
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As for HBO, the partnership gives the network a pretty substantial piece of children’s programming that could be a great way to push tentative families toward an HBO subscription. Licensing and merchandising accounted for most of the show’s funding, with less than 10% of it coming from PBS, the newspaper reports. New episodes of Sesame Street will begin airing as early as late fall 2015, while there will be no interruption to PBS Kids current roster of episodes. The partnership provides more money for Sesame Workshop while also allowing PBS to continuing carrying the program for free, albeit with a delay for new episodes. Upon premiering, new episodes of the series will be available on HBO, and HBO NOW, giving the giant more fodder to convince people to subscribe. HBO will also license approximately fifty past episodes of Pinky Dinky Doo and The Electric Company. Rival streaming services like Netlix and Amazon have also invested heavily in kids programming.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, HBO is “known for its dramas and risqué comedies aimed at adults, including “Game of Thrones”, “True Detective” and “Girls”. Their contract includes the stipulation that PBS, Sesame Street’s home network for the past 45 years, has rights to air new episodes of the show nine months after their release to HBO.
There’s no telling how much influence Sesame Street’s new neighborhood will have on its format-it could end up running into Avenue Q territory to confront today’s problems.
The Sesame Workshop, meanwhile, is clearly a fan of HBO shows.
“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.
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“We were instantly thrilled for the opportunity to bring an iconic series like Sesame Street to HBO”, said Richard Plepler, chief executive of HBO. Sesame Workshop the nonprofit educational organization that oversees “Sesame Street“, has partnered with HBO to make the next five seasons of the award-winning children’s series first available on HBO and its platforms.
