HBO has announced a five-year deal to carry new seasons of the popular children’s show Sesame Street. The partnership will make the next five seasons of available exclusively on HBO as well as HBO Go and HBO Now, the network’s streaming services. The deal will allow Sesame Workshop, its prodco, to produce almost twice as much new content as previous seasons and make the show available for free to PBS, the US public broadcaster, and its member stations nine months later.
Sesame Workshop will also produce a “Muppets” spinoff series and develop a new original educational series for children for HBO, which has licensed more than 150 library episodes of Sesame Street.
While Netflix and Amazon subscribers have been able to watch old episodes of “Sesame Street,” that content will no longer be available on those services as part of the HBO deal.