“Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?”

Sure, turn on HBO. The popular children’s program is moving. Sesame Street is going behind a paywall with its move to HBO, reports The New York Times.

Sesame Street Moves to HBO

In an exclusive, five-year deal, Sesame Street will air new episodes only on HBO and its streaming services HBO Go and HBO Now. HBO will have exclusive rights to new episodes for the first nine months after they air. After that, those episodes will air as reruns on PBS. As part of the deal, Sesame Street is pulling its reruns from Amazon Prime and Netflix. Sesame Street will also phase out its year-old Sesame Go subscription app, says the Washington Post, though the details and timeline are still being worked out.

The New York Times calls this an “unexpected union,” a program supported by nonprofit PBS partnering with a premium cable television channel. Sesame Street used to be available for free, reaching underserved audiences. Soon new episodes will only be available to HBO subscribers. While this may boost HBO’s appeal to families and provide Sesame Street with desperately needed funding, naysayers on social media blasted HBO and Sesame Street for the deal.

“Kids are getting squeezed in the middle,” said Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, a nonpartisan education group that advocates for responsible entertainment, in The New York Times article.

“In order to watch original episodes of the most iconic children’s program in television history, parents are now forced to fork over about $180 per year and subscribe to the most sexually explicit, most graphically violent television network in America. I can’t imagine a greater juxtaposition in television than this,” Winter said.

Sesame Street reruns will still be available for free on PBS and “on demand” through the PBSKids.org and the PBS Kids video apps.

Insider Take:

We can understand why parents and other fans of the show are disappointed that Sesame Street is moving to HBO. However, from a business perspective, we also see the need for companies and programs to adapt their offerings to the changing needs of the viewing audience and to make exclusive deals like this one.

In this case, Sesame Street gets additional revenue to continue its educational programming. In fact, this deal will allow Sesame Workshop to produce 35 episodes per year instead of the 18 it currently produces, according to PPPFocus.com. HBO also benefits by acquiring exclusive rights to original shows, cutting out competitors. As the over-the-top TV market grows, we anticipate that deals like this will be more common – even if they aren’t popular.