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

Why a Disney Spinoff of ESPN Would Be a Whiff | Analysis

According to first-quarter 2022 Parks Associates consumer research, 52% of U.S. internet households have at least one Disneystreaming service in their home. Within that, “ESPN+ is the most popular and...

Smart home devices have a big data problem, and it's growing

That trend, to start making customers pay to access data, dovetails with research found by Parks Associates earlier this year, which noted that new smart home security customers spend about $55, on av...

Sling TV: How Many Subscribers Does It Have?

Parks Associates thinks so. The research group this week issued a study showing that Sling has surpassed the one million subscriber mark, becoming the nation's sixth leading subscription streaming ser...

The New Face Of Digital Piracy: Part One

Consider: the Motion Picture Association of America estimated global losses to the movie industry at $18.2 billion — and that was in 2005. CreativeFuture, citing a 2013 study by NetNames, states that...