After many difficult months, “Sesame Street” has a moment to celebrate.
“Sesame Street,” the 56-year-old institution of children’s television, has signed a new distribution deal with Netflix, as well as a separate deal with PBS, the show announced on Monday.
That means new episodes of “Sesame Street” will now be available to the more than 300 million subscribers of Netflix, giving it significantly more reach than in the past. New episodes will also be available on PBS the day they are released on Netflix, the first time in roughly a decade that the public broadcaster will have access to brand-new “Sesame Street” content. The new agreements will go into effect later this year.
The deal is a much-needed shot in the arm for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces “Sesame Street” and has been in the throes of a financial crisis. Sesame Workshop laid off about 20 percent of its staff this year after several grants dried up, and, more significantly, it confronted a significant loss in revenue with the expiration of its current distribution deal, a lucrative contract with HBO.
Since 2015, HBO has paid Sesame Workshop $30 million to $35 million a year for new episodes of “Sesame Street,” The New York Times reported. But Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent company, is letting that deal expire as it turns away from children’s content and faces financial challenges of its own.
It was not immediately clear how much Netflix paid to distribute the show. But Sesame Workshop executives have warned employees for months that any new distribution agreements would bring in significantly less revenue than the old HBO deal.
In a note to staff, Sherrie Westin, the chief executive of Sesame Workshop, said that it was “certainly worth celebrating” that the show will be available in many more households going forward.
But, she added, “we will also have to find additional new ways to sustain our work, as the economics of these agreements are vastly different than those of the past, given the drastic market and media landscape shifts in recent years.”
John Koblin covers the television industry for The Times.
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