Starting this fall, the next five seasons of Sesame Street will air on HBO. The decision comes after the show faced significant funding problems. Sesame Street only received about 10 percent of its funding from PBS. The rest of the money mainly came from licensing revenue like DVD sales, which have slacked off recently due to the rise of streaming services. The show had cut back to 18 episodes each year, but by partnering with HBO, it will be able to produce 35 episodes a year. The exact financial terms of the deal are unclear, but it does give HBO the rights to exclusively air the show for nine months, after which it will also appear on PBS, which has been its host channel for 45 years. During those nine HBO-exclusive months, PBS will air newly edited episodes from recent seasons. “The partnership is really a great thing for kids,” the chief executive of Sesame Workshop told The New York Times. “We’re getting revenues we otherwise would not have gotten, and with this, we can do even more content for kids.”
