HBO and Sesame Street have announced that the long-running children’s series will premiere the next five seasons on the pay cabler.
In a sign of the times, Sesame Street has teamed up with HBO in order to generate additional funding for the children’s series. The new episodes will air on HBO, HBO Go, and HBO Now a whopping nine months before they are allowed to air on PBS.
“Our new partnership with HBO represents a true winning public-private partnership model,” said Jeffrey D. Dunn, Sesame Workshop’s CEO. “It provides Sesame Workshop with the critical funding it needs to be able to continue production of Sesame Street and secure its nonprofit mission of helping kids grow smarter, stronger and kinder; it gives HBO exclusive pay cable and SVOD access to the nation’s most important and historic educational programming; and it allows Sesame Street to continue to air on PBS and reach all children, as it has for the past 45 years.”
The funding from HBO will also allow Sesame Workshop to produce a new Sesame Street spinoff series “as well as develop a new original educational series for children.”
Money has been an issue for Sesame Street over the past couple years. As CNN reports, “Sesame Workshop has lost millions of dollars in recent years amid sweeping changes in the media business. Between 2013 and 2014, revenue from donations, distribution fees (paid by PBS stations) and licensing (for merchandise sales) all declined.”
As for how HBO benefits, they’ll now have a very large collection of children’s programming — an area that they’ve yet to break into. Their competitors, Netflix and Hulu, offer lots of content for children.
The proof may’ve been in the pudding for a while. Sesame Street characters have appeared on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, and Sesame Street has spoofed Game of Thrones.
Watch: Sesame Street spoofs Game of Thrones in “Game of Chairs”:
