‘Sesame Street’ to Air First on HBO for Next 5 Seasons | Hacker News Reader

‘Sesame Street’ to Air First on HBO for Next 5 Seasons

nytimes.com

68 pointsuptown84 comments

The news is not that they will have the exclusive rights for 9 months. After all, kids can watch the same episode over and over and not get tire of it. The important thing is this:

>The “Sesame Street” episodes now available on Amazon and Netflix will no longer be on those outlets because of the HBO deal.

The important thing you mentioned is the same news as the fact that they have exclusive rights. Exclusivity means other outlets can't show it.

"Exclusive for nine months" extends to the new episodes, whereas Netflix and such are showing older episodes. They're different things.

I understood that Netflix won't be able to stream any episodes at all, old or new.

Yes, you're right, I was agreeing with you.

Especially noteworthy, given this:

>About two-thirds of children now watch “Sesame Street” on demand and do not tune in to PBS to watch the show.

Will the episodes be available for streaming anywhere other than HBO?

We currently stream episodes via PBS, so I'd been assuming (perhaps errantly) that this arrangement would continue.

That seems plausible. I'd expect that HBO considers PBS much less threatening than Netflix.

This article, and the details behind what is driving the changes for Sesame Street, are a good illustration of the tectonic changes coming to the industry.

Combined with HBO Now available without Cable, availability of services like Sling, and the recent financial troubles in the cable industry it is an interesting time. Cord-cutting is no long an if, it's a how quickly.

Or am I reading too much into this? Wishful thinking?

No I think you're right. The one big thing that has yet to really move online is sports. Once I can watch all the games I want online, cable is going away

That's already very possible too, they just need to make it unrestricted. For those outside the US services like NFL/MLB/NBA Game Pass are really fantastic. I can watch live, on demand, and condensed versions of any game.

I watched the most recent Superbowl via streaming. Technically, streaming sports is about as easy as streaming any other video. One big hurdle is all the licensing because there is a lot of money involved. Edit: The other hurdle is horizontally scaling live streaming video to over 100 million devices.

Networks like the NFL Network are doomed as soon as most NFL fans realize they could be streaming literally any game they want to watch from a Netflix-style service, or watch any number of games in a community from a curated Cytube-style list, instead of having just the 1 game at a time.

Once the NFL put together the NFL Network it quickly started using it to broadcast games. It isn't doomed by streaming, it provides some (much?) of the stadium side infrastructure that is still necessary for streaming.

Is there a way to legally stream sports like the big football game in february, without already having a cable subscription? That's the one thing (well, aside from big bang theory) my family and I miss from cable.

I was surprised to find it so easy to stream from NFL.com last winter. Maybe adblock software helped. And the television ads were included in the stream and so were basically unavoidable. I used the old-fashioned adblock of muting the stream during the television commercials.

If you are close enough to a big city, you should be able to use free-to-air TV broadcasts. You can get an ATSC receiver for your PC if you don't have a TV, and DVR software that lets you skip commercials and run your own replays as you like.

Not completely true. Everyone wanting to want to watch it at the same time causes issues. Other videos you can distribute the video to caches ahead of time, so the burden on the outgoing connection is less.

Are you describing a problem between live streaming and pre-recorded video? How does Twitch handle their load? How many more people are watching the average football game vs watched "Twitch Plays Pokemon" at its peak?

Edit: TPP had 60,000-70,000 simultaneous viewers on average, with a peak of 120,000.[1] In 2014, each NFL game had about 17.6 million viewers.[2] So an order of magnitude increase. How well does live streaming video scale horizontally?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon#View...

[2]http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2015/01/09/nfl-2014-tv-reca...

MLB streamed to 60 million viewers on opening day this year. [1]

Granted that is 14 different events being streamed, but they eclipse Twitch in terms of live streaming by a huge amount.

[1] - http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/07/mlb-com-hits-home-run-with-...

You can take the Eurovision Song Contest as example.

Millions of people watching via livestream, overall (including TV), the largest annual TV event (197 million overall)

Livestreaming scales very nicely horizontally, if done properly.

And this is an event that is completely done without any ads or commercial investor backing it.

stephengillie, "twitch plays pokemon" maxed out at 121,000 concurrent (according to Twitch) viewers, last years Super Bowl maxed out at 120,800,000 viewers. So yes, I would say it is a considerably different scale.

This is an area where MLB is way ahead of the rest. There was even a nice article linked here a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9416565

Yup... to the point where (as mentioned before) MLB is running HBO Now. (HBO's attempt at doing it inhouse with a bunch of ex-Microsoft peeps failed...)

The problem is that like a lot of other streaming content, sports has to follow archaic rules designed to protect the broadcasters. Specifically for MLB, you are not able to stream any game from your local market's team(s). This nullifies the biggest market who would be interested in streaming games.

The funny thing is they actually stream the local broadcasts (you choose which one you want) and then cut out the commercials. If they showed the commercials I don't see how it's different than watching locally on TV, except there's even more money involved because you paid a lot more than the carriage fee for MLB.tv.

It's even a nice compliment to watching it on TV because you can watch on a mobile device. ESPN lets you stream stuff if you have a cable subscription, but you can't stream local games with MLB.tv regardless of your cable subscription.

"If they showed the commercials I don't see how it's different than watching locally on TV..."

I have always wondered about this. I have to assume television broadcasters (e.g. the regional Fox Sports networks) who pay billions over decades to have broadcast rights want to protect their hegemony on TV. But in general you would think that they could sell their advertisers on the fact they are also being viewed by online subscribers. Maybe the advertisers don't want their otherwise local commercials broadcast, but then that doesn't explain why I can watch commercials when I watch a regional channel from another state.

"ESPN lets you stream stuff if you have a cable subscription, but you can't stream local games with MLB.tv regardless of your cable subscription."

But ESPN doesn't really let you stream local stuff of the US's big 4 leagues. It is unfair to compare the professional sports streaming options of ESPN3, Fox Sports Go, NBCSN, etc with those of the 4 leagues considering that none of the broadcasters can broadcast ANY games, much less be blackout-stricken.

I was always under the impression that those rules were designed to protect the venues, not the broadcasters. I.e., if you're local and want to watch the game, you should come to the ballpark and watch it live. As I recall, there was a time when a game would be blacked out on local broadcast as well if the stadium wasn't sold out.

Since baseball stadiums rarely sellout (unless you're AT&T Park) I think it's more to protect the broadcast agreements with whatever local cable network it is that caries the game. The NFL used to have agreements like the one you mentioned, where the game was blacked out unless the stadium sells out - but I think they got told they couldn't do that anymore.

I did a bit of reading and apparently it varies by sport. I.e., the NFL blackouts work as I understood them to protect the stadiums, but the MLB and NHL blackouts work differently and are designed to protect the local broadcasters. TIL.

Maybe initially, but the markets carved out are so huge to make attending a game from most of the market impractical. For example, Iowa is in the local market for the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Milwaukee Brewers, St. Louis Cardinals, Kansas City Royals, and Minnesota Twins. [1] That means that people in Iowa on any given night might only be able to watch 9 of the 15 games on MLB.tv.

[1] - http://deadspin.com/mlbs-awful-blackout-rules-are-finally-un...

Their customer support is top notch too. I had noticed a video quality issue after the All-Star break and at first, figured it was just some crappy old standard definition cameras at one of the baseball parks. When it continued to the next location, I realized something else was up. I emailed MLB.tv support and they had the problem fixed during the game in about 20 minutes.

I think you're failing to consider the impact of the death throes of an industry.

I'm intrigued, can you detail the impacts you see?

We're already seeing them. Bouts with the FCC. Dwindling regulatory capture. Attempt after attempt to squeeze through caustic regulation. Things like SOPA and CISPA. All attempts to curtail the Internet "wilderness."

But what does it mean to "cut the cord"? If your IP connection is still coming from Comcast/Verizon/Time Warner, you've still got a cord and a corresponding bill.

The real question to me is whether the cable providers can turn $150 "Triple Play" (phone/internet/TV) bills into $150 IP-only bills. If I were them, I'd keep prices on the 'next generation' (100Mbit+) of IP-only plans very close to those that include traditional TV service, and offer bundles of discounted (unmetered?) third party services. "Cutting the cord" won't save you very much money as long as there's minimal competition in the physical infrastructure.

$150 IP-only bills

That is only going to happen if they can maintain monopoly pricing. Which is gradually being chiselled away at; maybe the US will even invent LLU.

Why wouldn't LLU have the same effect in the U.S. on cable that it had on DSL, namely causing essentially all investment in higher-bandwidth infrastructure to cease?

It was my understanding that DSL was at or around its theoretical maximum anyways in most places.

Gradually chiselled away? Where???

In my suburb of Boston, both Verizon Fios and Comcast have been available for a few years now.

Neither one has lowered its prices one cent.

The only positive change was a relatively minor increase in downstream (but not upstream) speeds for the same package price at Comcast.

Duopoly is usually not enough to foster real competition.

Considering the options out there cord cutting may not be they best financial choice for some customers. Be careful because its easy to saddle yourself with forty to fifty plus dollars a month of selected content.

And they can keep playing that game, because at some point millennials will be tired of paying for stuff they don't want and old enough to finally make municipal broadband a real thing across this country.

I never took the "cord" in cord cutting to be quite so literal.

What I hope (and of course it's not by any means a done deal) is that the content producers are going to be coming out from under the control of those who own the last mile distribution.

That's why net neutrality is so important. If HBO has to ask permission of Time Warner for me to access HBO Now then we've gained nothing. With it, we can expect more competition, variety and choice of content.

I hope.

I know where you were going with your example, but amusingly you chose Time Warner, who actually owns HBO. Which illustrates a totally different problem in the IPtv world. :)

In your example a better choice would be Comcast.

Nice catch, and pretty funny.

Time Warner Inc. (the content company that owns HBO, Warner Bros., etc.) and Time Warner Cable (in the process of being acquired by Charter) are 2 separate companies, so his example was actually fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner_Cable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner

The telecoms fight this because they don't want to become just a "dump pipe" that delivers data to you. At that point, their product/service has been commoditized and it's a race to the bottom.

Right now, the biggest protection for cable is the insane license agreements with layers of bureaucracy. Having done contract work for three network TV shows, its interesting as cable providers license from the networks which licenses from the TV show. Three's a reason why some Hulu broadcasts are delayed and some shows have full seasons, some the last X, some entire series. There's no real standard for who owns the rights to what.

Big Cable won't go down swinging, sports still sell TV subscriptions and we're seeing the evolution like DishAnywhere. More than likely, we'll see package services from ContentOverIP with more fragmentation: Service A provides TV Shows from Networks A B & C but no live broadcasts. Service B provides live broadcasts from A & C and on demand and so forth. I doubt Al La Carte will happen.

It's not just cord-cutting, however, this changes Sesame Street's relationship with PBS, and over-the-air broadcast service. The group Sesame Street needs to reach the most is not cord-cutters, it's people without an Internet connection. Low income and low literacy families are what Sesame Street was created to reach, that's why it's a show designed to appeal to both kids and adults. Certainly with a show like Sesame Street having the newest episodes is not necessarily critical (though they have done some good topical pieces in the past, the episode where a Hurricane hits Sesame Street comes to mind), so it's not a major issue in this case.

Needless to say I was happy to see that there would continue to be some relationship with PBS, and I can't emphasize enough how important I find over-the-air public programming (both TV and radio).

EDIT: To be clear, I do not necessarily think this is a bad deal. I think the STW produces great content and anything that helps them continue to produce quality non-commercial content is great. I just hope that content continues to be available for free on over-the-air broadcasts in the long term.

It's my understanding from the press release that, once the 9-month window passes, PBS will get the episodes both for broadcast and for streaming, and they'll get them for free. I might have misread, though. Regardless, they're also trying to keep the relationship with PBS alive, probably for exactly the reasons you state.

>"Historically, less than 10 percent of the funding for “Sesame Street” episodes came from PBS, with the rest financed through licensing revenue, such as DVD sales.

So this does change the relationship with PBS. But instead of PBS using their limited funding to make up for the decline in licensing income (90% of which came from other sources to begin with), it seems like they'll still get to air Sesame Street and Sesame Street will have a more significant source of funding.

Yeah, but I'm worried that current-events based shows that feature public figures like the First Lady will be delayed to lower income households.

The kids won't really care, but it makes Sesame Street less of a bullhorn, because going on Sesame street next week only gets you into the homes of HBO subscribers.

Maybe with the 'differently edited' previous shows they'll be rotating through PBS, they'll address this.

It sounds like a decision come to out of desperation. :/

I think it's interesting that you and others are using the term "industry" here. Sesame Street is made by the non-profit Children's Television Workshop and it has always aired on Public Television. It was founded specifically with the intention of not being industry.

If you have a former IBMer running your licensing program because of its size and complexity, then you are industry regardless of your founding.

You apparently are only able to think in terms of commerce? Not every undertaking that is large and complex is industry.

No, I think in terms of attention and time. Sometimes attention is indicated by the trading of goods or currency. On the other hand, Sesame Street is an industry with a lot of money in it. They can talk all they want about their humble origins, but they are big business.

This is an interesting social class issue. 3 years ago, Mitt Romney said he wanted to defund PBS.

Today we see a show on public broadcast selling the exclusivity rights to HBO. Kids whose parents pay for HBO now get to see sesame street before the kids who cant afford it. In fact, those kids may even be too old by the time the episodes they would want to see get widely distributed.

Today's episode brought to you by the letters H B and O and PAYING viewers like you.

No issue at all. Kids are born every day; pick up watching Sesame Street at essentially random points. It makes no difference when you begin watching. If HBO 'leads' free TV, the kids will never know and never suffer any disadvantage.

> In fact, those kids may even be too old by the time the episodes they would want to see get widely distributed.

I don't think kids around sesame street age care much about which particular episode they're watching. Probably not a lot of water cooler discussion the next day.

I agree, but I feel like thats not really the point of making a quality child education show sponsored by the government

It will be so obvious when big bird has an iPhone 3g and a nexus 5.

I'm really looking forwards to a gritty Vice episode covering Oscar the Grouch and homelessness on Sesame Street.

Reminds me of this from Dave Chapelle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLdim8hWR44

I watched sesame street a few years ago and it had devolved into a pretty annoying cartoon with lots of loud noises and sound effects. There was still a physical set and some human actors, but each scene segued into the cartoons. Horrible.

Let's hope it goes back to being a show with realistic life-size puppets and human cast members who interact/sing with them.

I started rewatching Sesame Street a few years ago when I had a child. I was actually amazed how good it continues to be. Compared to what else kids have access to, its very level, accessible and continues to be good for adults to share with them. I assumed I would approach it as an adult and think it "was better when I was a kid", but it really is still excellent, in my opinion.

It's incorporated more animated segments and has some frenetic pieces, but re-watching some old shows reveals that as well (go watch the pinball counting song again to see what I mean). It's staying relevant by copying its competition while staying high quality.

You must be too young to remember the original Sesame Street: wild birds interacting with French mimes. Now THOSE were the good old days.

HBO and Netflix competing is good for us all.

Yes, but this is a further step to the "cableization" of internet tv. It's really getting to the point where it's not much different than cable. Each network has exclusive shows, so they are not competing on customer experience of the streaming service (such as interface, recommendations, etc.), but on content. This is not necessarily a problem, but it dilutes what some expected from cord-cutting. Now if I want a breadth of content, I need to subscribe to Netflix, HBO, Hulu and possibly some smaller services. That adds up and isn't really as "a la carte" as we wanted, considering the small number of competitors in the space.

Again, it's not bad, per se, but it's not a smorgasbord of content in one service with one interface.

Public television is not about competition

Actually, yes it is. Watching public television is an activity that takes time. Groups compete for your time and attention. Public TV asks for donations which people could use on other things. Competition isn't a dirty word, its how we live our limited lives.

Public television is explicitly and intentionally set apart from competition with for-profit television. The original intention was that public programming should not have to be a commercial success in order to continue to be funded. Inserting "competition" into a discussion about public television makes it seem as though it should be subject to the same "market forces" as for-profit television. It should not be, and attempts to make it "run like a business" are ideologically driven.

I use scare quotes to emphasize that "competition" and "market forces" are human creations, not laws of physics as the hypercapitalists would have you believe, and their application is a choice.

I can watch TV, go ride a bike, go on a hike, or go back to sleep. Public television, and any other optional activity, is in competition for my time and attention. We only have so much time to spend (welcome to our linear existence) and we cannot get more just because its public television. It has to compete.

Competition is not a dirty or scary word. It is a description of how we evaluate things to spend our limited time with.

Also, the idea that Public TV doesn't have to compete is just plain wrong. It competes with every other budget item in the federal budget. It has to provide value or it will be cut. How we judge its value is up to the individual.

Looking forward to the development of "Game of Chairs" into a spinoff series.

http://youtu.be/dhWUFXvaZjo

Wasn't "Fraggle Rock" essentially Sesame Street on HBO?

Crashbox was another one. HBO is no stranger to kid's shows.

Jim Henson was central to the creation of Fraggle Rock and a branch of his media company was wholly responsible for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraggle_Rock

Sesame Street is a bit different, I believe he was invited to add the Muppets to the show and that these segments were very popular. Still, he wasn't responsible for the show as a whole and didn't have the same role as he and his company had in Fraggle Rock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street

Well some of the original episodes got rated R: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.h...

I heard that PBS had to edit some of the episodes so they don't get the R rating. On HBO they can show shows with an R rating. Then edit them so they are PG or G later on.

Little slips like Cookie Monster smoking and eating a pipe, a lost girl going into Mr. Hooper's apartment because he has milk and cookies there teaching kids to go with strangers, stuff like that.

The first presidential debate is behind a paywall on Fox. Now Sesame Street is behind a paywall on HBO. I mean, Sesame Street!!!! Is nothing sacred?

Sesame Workshop gets more resources and episodes, PBS gets to stop paying for Sesame Street. I don't think it's all that bad. It's not like it's going off the air on PBS any time soon.

I don't think Sesame Street is as huge for kids now as it used to be. There's just so much more content available now, including on Netflix. Still good for HBO, but not a reason for most parents to switch or become customers.

The thing that makes Sesame Street a reason for parents to switch or become customers is that it's actually a show that's tolerable (I'd suggest actually "enjoyable") for parents. A pretty large percentage of the content in Sesame Street is over the heads of its core audience, but hits a bullseye for parents.

Why does this matter? Much of the widely-covered "screen time" research has been of pretty poor quality, but there's some indication that the perceived or observed harm from screen time comes in part due to a lack of personal interaction while kids are sitting in front of a TV, especially as TV is used as a babysitter. With parents watching, laughing, talking to their kids about what they're seeing, not only might it mitigate that harm, but it certainly reinforces the actual educational content in the program.

My wife, a developmental pediatrician and neuroscientist, has a rule of thumb: it's "bad" screen time if you're not paying enough attention to what your kid is watching to follow the story yourself. Sesame Street is entertaining enough to make it easy to watch.

I guess the silver lining is that Fred Rogers didn't live to see it.

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