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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I keep seeing this and people griping about it so much bothers me. They pulled some decades old episodes. There are still some decades old episodes. New episodes are still being made, after an exclusivity period they’re still on PBS.

Seasons 39 though 52 are still available.

I’m willing to bet very few of the people complaining actually ever watched any of the cut episodes which is probably why they were dropped.

This just seems like a good opportunity for people to be upset about something, but it doesn’t make any sense.

Go buy the DVDs if you care so much and stop acting like HBO reducing the number of seasons available to 17 is like they canceled it.

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Why does it bother you? Part of the appeal of the streaming services is the long tail. That shows produced / funded by the service will remain indefinitely. That's become one of the expectations. When expectations are broken, people become unhappy.

In the case of Sesame Street, at least the missing episodes are available on Youtube. That mitigates things somewhat. But it's a shame the other shows were removed completely with no legal way to find them. I hope the resulting blowback is enough to keep streaming services from doing this again.

I feel like I explained what bothered me extensively.

Did you though?

All you said was:

>I keep seeing this and people griping about it so much bothers me.

Why does someone griping about the fact that their expectations of a service (especially one you personally aren't providing) doesn't match reality bother you at all? Why do you have an opinion on their opinion of a third party that they pay money to for a service?

One of the promises of the web was that archives could live on forever.

What we're seeing is a strong reaction to that promise being broken. It's not about whether you're in the audience or even if you have young kids (or may some day) who might want to watch the archives, it's that the vision of the great comprehensive virtual library is dead.

There's nothing you can do about this except start building private collections again. If you want to make sure you can still have access to something in 35 years, buy it in either a physical medium or a digital medium you can download without DRM.

What DVDs? This collection is the top hit on Amazon, and it's all post-Elmo dumbed down crap:

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sesame-Street-Collection-Various...

I looked for sesame street for years, and HBO Max was the only source I could find for the old critically-acclaimed / educator approved series.

Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 (1969 - 1974) [DVD] https://a.co/d/fIPgZxW

I think buying DVDs of 4000 episodes is gonna be pretty impractical

Join some FB movie collector groups and you’d be surprised

There are a lot of hoarders.

And, to be honest, whenever I've given into the temptation to buy a DVD collection of some favorite old TV series, I usually watch a few episodes for nostalgia purposes and then it gathers dust.

SD Blu Rays would knock that down to "possible but impractical" - they could easily hold about 25 episodes per disk.

As would watching 4000 episodes. Over 100 sixteen hour days of content.

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