--- title: Big Bird and Big Media: What Sesame Street on HBO Means description: How techno-narcissism and market fundamentalism have lead to privatization of the arts and education canonical: https://time.com/4005048/problem-with-sesame-street-moving-to-hbo/ author: Siva Vaidhyanathan article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-08-21T17:28:36.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:04:59.259Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Big Bird and Big Media: What Sesame Street on HBO Means og:description: How techno-narcissism and market fundamentalism have lead to privatization of the arts and education og:url: https://time.com/4005048/problem-with-sesame-street-moving-to-hbo/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc6aadc3021214538/698860493c163988344595c4/big-bird.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2832 og:image:height: 1593 og:image:alt: Sesame Street's Big Bird character in New York on Nov. 9, 2009. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Big Bird and Big Media: What Sesame Street on HBO Means twitter:description: How techno-narcissism and market fundamentalism have lead to privatization of the arts and education twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc6aadc3021214538/698860493c163988344595c4/big-bird.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Big Bird and Big Media: What _Sesame Street_ on HBO Means > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=d66a6cc2-99c4-4137-8412-5a368446977b&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Sesame Street To Air on HBO For Next Five Seasons [Watch (HLS stream): Sesame Street To Air on HBO For Next Five Seasons](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/eNKvGZlS.m3u8) (1:25)  _Published 2015-08-13. The news that HBO licensed "Sesame Street" for a five-year run was bound to raise a few eyebrows, but it's actually a pretty beneficial partnership._ by [Siva Vaidhyanathan](https://time.com/author/siva-vaidhyanathan/) ## Siva Vaidhyanathan Aug 21, 2015 5:28 PM UTC  Sesame Street's Big Bird character in New York on Nov. 9, 2009. Sesame Street's Big Bird character in New York on Nov. 9, 2009. Stan Honda—AFP/Getty Images by [Siva Vaidhyanathan](https://time.com/author/siva-vaidhyanathan/) ## Siva Vaidhyanathan Aug 21, 2015 5:28 PM UTC As we strive to make sense of the announcement that _Sesame Street_ will [debut](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/business/media/sesame-street-heading-to-hbo-in-fall.html?%5Fr=0) its next five years of new episodes on the expensive cable network HBO, we should step back from the particulars and look at what this shift shows us about the current state of American life. The _Sesame Street_ move is not a horrible thing in itself. After all, the new episodes will show up for free on Public Broadcasting Service stations nine months after HBO viewers got them. Instead, the move is a symptom of how Americans view our collective obligations to each other – especially to our poorest children. _Sesame Street_ needed to replace the revenue it has lost since people moved from buying DVDs to streaming older programs. HBO will pay a fee to Sesame Workshop, which produces the show, for the exclusive right to stream and broadcast the episodes for nine months. In 2014, Sesame Workshop lost $11 million, and its total operating revenues were $104 million, a 14% decrease from 2013\. Most of that revenue comes from DVD sales and from licensing the characters and creative elements for toys, school supplies, and other commercial uses. Only about 10% comes from PBS affiliates. Given that arithmetic, it’s hard to argue with Sesame Workshop’s decision. To continue to produce high-quality, fresh, educational episodes for the preschool set, the show needs to exploit every resource it can find while ensuring that its longstanding commitment to public broadcasting remains — even if those who can’t afford HBO get a staler product. The short-term harm is trivial. The long-term gain seems substantial. But how did we get to the point at which one of the greatest successes of American creativity, philanthropy, and government policy has to hustle for loose change from a major corporation like Time Warner, which owns HBO, and from toy customers? Isn’t children’s educational programming a public good, one that market forces clearly can’t support on their own? There are two major ideological forces that have pushed such moves to privatize education in all its forms over the past 40 years. The first force is techno-narcissism. There’s a widespread and erroneous assumption that new technologies radically change how everyone lives. In reality, such change is slow, stunted, complex, and uneven. The wealthy and educated who tend to read and write about new technology obsessively also tend to exaggerate the cultural and economic influence of technological change because they embrace it. So we assume everybody is streaming video from tablets and settling in on Sunday evenings to watch _Game of Thrones_ on HBO. After all, everyone we know is doing that. The assumption that Americans are significantly “cutting the cord” and opting to only stream Internet video instead of relying on cable and satellite pay television is also highly exaggerated. In 2013 cable and satellite subscriptions [fell](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-19/u-s-pay-tv-subscriptions-fall-for-first-time-as-streaming-gains) for the first time in history. But they only fell by about 250,000 people. Cord-cutting is a slow and so-far marginal phenomenon and services like HBO and ESPN are preparing for a more significant shift if it happens. The mantra that “broadcast television is dead” has been echoing for 20 years. Yet broadcast television lives on and plays important roles in the daily lives of millions of Americans. More than 50 million Americans [rely](https://www.nab.org/documents/newsroom/pressRelease.asp?id=3168) on over-the-air free television. As you might assume, these viewers are disproportionately poor and/or live in rural areas. If cord-cutting grows, especially as purchasing power among lower-income working people falls, the percentage of viewers relying on free over-the-air television will rise, not fall. The second and more pernicious force is market fundamentalism. In the 1960s, Americans took seriously the concept of market failure: There are some important things such as education, law enforcement, defense, environmental regulation, and the arts that market actors can’t or won’t provide at the level that would allow society to thrive fully. That’s why we saw expansions in federal and state support for science, schools, public art, and public radio and television. But lately we have forgotten that lesson. Those programs were so successful that Americans just assumed they had always existed and always would. We forgot how much we had to collectively invest to get them going. As we systematically strip public support from these essential elements of the good life, we are left with major institutions like public broadcasting acting just like commercial outlets: chasing viewers and soliciting corporate sponsors. Relying on philanthropy has real costs as well. Museums, libraries, universities, schools, and public broadcasting institutions have to appeal to the whims of the wealthy to ensure financial health. The immediate needs of the poor fall in importance. A proper response to the _Sesame Street_ move and other such changes would be to seriously examine how Americans could generate and share the information and educational skills we will need to be effective citizens of a democratic republic this century. That could mean a reinvestment in public broadcasting funding. It could also mean a massive public effort to supply fast and cheap broadband to rural and low-income communities. We rarely ask what we need as citizens and rally our leaders to provide it. We have not since the 1960s. Instead, Big Bird works for a big media company now. He indulges big donors. He promotes his image in toy stores. And only as an afterthought does he hold the hands of poor children and lead them into the unkind future. ## Transcript If it seems weird that the same channel best known for this, they're gonna live in my new world or they can die in their old one, will also be airing this, it's time for the Sesame Street alphabet, then you're probably not looking at it from HBO or Sesame Street's perspective. The news that HBO licensed Sesame Street for a five year run was Bound to raise a few eyebrows, but it's actually a pretty beneficial partnership. Lately, Sesame Street has had trouble covering the cost of the show partially due to streaming services cutting into profits. PBS only funded about 10 % of the show while most of the rest came from product license Namely, DVD sales. So the HBO deal gives it a much needed cash infusion and the ability to bump up to 35 half hour episodes a year. Don't worry though, Elmo and crew won't be completely locked behind HBO's pay wall. PBS will air new episodes nine months after they run on HBO. For its part, HBO gets an extremely popular show, somewhat exclusively, to help defend itself against its video streaming competitors. Online subscription services like Netflix and Amazon have been offering programming for kids for a while now. And now it's beefing up it's children's programming in true HBO fashion, by snatching up one of the most influential children TV shows. 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