24 ms·

HBO Max pulls nearly 200 ‘Sesame Street’ episodes

245 points by carride 4y ago

bradleyjg 4y ago
I thought this was going to be about older children’s programs not conforming to current mores. Like Cookie Monster promoting obesity or Oscar the Grouch being bullied or something. This is a straightforward business decision. I’m not sure why it’s especially interesting. HBO presumably has the data to make the right business trade offs.
- snoopy_telex 4y ago
  HBO Max has been dropping content ever sense the Warner merge. I totally believe the plan is to kill it and move everything to a discovery+ combined platform.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    My understanding is they are going to Kill Discovery+ in favor of HBOMax as a Person that only has Discovery+ and has no interest in HBOMax I hate they are doing that. Discovery+ is a great low cost streaming service that I get a ton of value from.
    - Terretta 4y ago
      We subscribe to both. Discovery+ is our “white noise” streaming source to put on when we feel we need to have “chatter” and “activity” in the background during a WFH workday. Pull up any of the hundred generic home improvement shows, hit play, leave it on all day. Stuff goes on you don’t need to pay hard attention to, or can pay soft attention to if you’re trying to think about something else to trigger a lateral thought, just like looking up from a laptop in a cafe or open plan office. With HBO content, you might accidentally feel you should watch something. Never happens with Discovery+!
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        While I certainly use it for that as well, there are a few shows that I do like to actually watch and pay attention to. Re-watching Dirty Jobs or Mythbusters, or watching Good eats, or Worst Cooks In America....
      - sdrabing 4y ago
        I've always thought it was strange that so many people just watch TV for noise. Any love for silence anymore?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        Silence is unnatural. Most of humanity's ancestors grew up in the wilderness that was replete with noises.
        ghaff 4y ago
        There's nature not-silence--or a computer-generated version of same--and there's TV (or even music for the most part). Also tons of sounds in my house even if I don't put something on but mostly want to work without added inputs.
        Terretta 4y ago
        Exactly. Some steady sounds mask the intermittent sounds that are otherwise more interruptive.
        antihipocrat 4y ago
        A forest on a still night is much quieter than most urban areas.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
  - rhino369 4y ago
    The plan isn't to kill it, but they are going to combine them. They are reducing redundancy, getting bad assets off their books, and reducing costs. These streaming services (minus Netflix) are not profitable. Some of the Hollywood trades reported that HBOMax Kids programming isn't highly watched. Let a service with better kid viwership numbers license it instead.
- dTal 4y ago
  >programs not conforming to current mores. Like Cookie Monster promoting obesity That was addressed 17 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_Monster#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_Monster#Development
  - lkbm 4y ago
    One thing I found frustrating about that whole controversy was that this song is from 1987[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMxpDbp51A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMxpDbp51A
derbOac 4y ago
One thing that's always been confusing to me is this: I assume that Sesame Street must have received a significant amount of public funding over the years, from governments, while it was being broadcast on public television. As such, it seems like there should be some kind of legal obligation to keep it public. This is one of my pet peeves — when a project receives significant public funding and then it is just essentially reverted into an entirely private benefit. It shows up in a number of domains of activities (telecommunications, research grants, and so forth) and always seems to me that there should be significant legal consequences for not maintaining public benefit or access in some way. I might be wrong in this particular case though — maybe the public funding was always indirect, through the broadcasters?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Sesame Street was developed by a 501c3 (Children’s Television Workshop renamed to Sesame Workshop) and sold to PBS. Episodes were licensed by a publicly funded organization, they weren’t produced by one.
  - gdubs 4y ago
    Fascinating — but I'd be curious how much of the production was funded with those licensing fees. Maybe they're not legally obligated to keep it public — but ethically?
    - bradleyjg 4y ago
      If I sell software to a government agency am I morally obligated to give up my copyright?
      - prepend 4y ago
        If you subsist entirely on grants and charitable donations and you yourself are a charity then I think it’s reasonable that your software should be open source. There’s actually a push for all custom developed code for the US government be open sourced, even if produced by a contractor. Seems reasonable to me.
umeshunni 4y ago
That might be why sesame street tweeted that they are still available on YouTube https://mobile.twitter.com/sesamestreet/status/1560746048922034185?s=20&t=bTnKvjtTzbm7Htdh__inFw https://mobile.twitter.com/sesamestreet/status/1560746048922...
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Yeah, no. Gotta be pre-Elmo. :-/
  - smegger001 4y ago
    elmos is the reason my children don't watch sesame street.
    - t-writescode 4y ago
      Why?
      - JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Elmo is kind of arrogant. The other muppets had the same fears, anxieties (and hopes, wishes) as the children watching. We related to them. We saw how they solved their problems. Elmo is kind of awesome, perfect, full of energy, unflappable. And he seems to know it.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I’m almost more disappointed to learn there were only 650 episodes available to begin with. IIRC, Sesame Street has thousands of episodes. At some point when I was watching as a child, they would display the episode number on screen at the end of the intro song, and it was huge. Where can someone access all of that cultural history?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- colechristensen 4y ago
  >Where can someone access all of that cultural history? DVD box sets. Pirate sites.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    I admittedly haven't looked into this at all, but I suspect a majority aren't available on DVD, particularly the ones from the 80s and 90s. "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time.
    - swatcoder 4y ago
      > "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming should be making economically viable for the first time. Broadly, it does, but the countless historic episodes (of many things) are not sitting there as nicely encoded video files with cleared distribution rights. Much work will not have been well-archived in the first place (if at all), nor catalogued well (if at all), and there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it. In all, it makes the per-item preparatory effort quite high and means that most old stuff will be left to volunteer, underground distribution for a very long time.
      - 4y ago
colechristensen 4y ago
I keep seeing this and people griping about it so much bothers me. They pulled some decades old episodes. There are still some decades old episodes. New episodes are still being made, after an exclusivity period they’re still on PBS. Seasons 39 though 52 are still available. I’m willing to bet very few of the people complaining actually ever watched any of the cut episodes which is probably why they were dropped. This just seems like a good opportunity for people to be upset about something, but it doesn’t make any sense. Go buy the DVDs if you care so much and stop acting like HBO reducing the number of seasons available to 17 is like they canceled it.
- wishfish 4y ago
  Why does it bother you? Part of the appeal of the streaming services is the long tail. That shows produced / funded by the service will remain indefinitely. That's become one of the expectations. When expectations are broken, people become unhappy. In the case of Sesame Street, at least the missing episodes are available on Youtube. That mitigates things somewhat. But it's a shame the other shows were removed completely with no legal way to find them. I hope the resulting blowback is enough to keep streaming services from doing this again.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    I feel like I explained what bothered me extensively.
    - monkeywork 4y ago
      Did you though? All you said was: >I keep seeing this and people griping about it so much bothers me. Why does someone griping about the fact that their expectations of a service (especially one you personally aren't providing) doesn't match reality bother you at all? Why do you have an opinion on their opinion of a third party that they pay money to for a service?
- ClassyJacket 4y ago
  I think buying DVDs of 4000 episodes is gonna be pretty impractical
greymalik 4y ago
https://archive.ph/2022.08.21-151424/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/arts/television/sesame-street-hbo-max.html https://archive.ph/2022.08.21-151424/https://www.nytimes.com...
prirun 4y ago
Streaming services have already stopped publishing entire seasons, going back to the TV model of an episode a week. This is to prevent people from subscribing to a service, watching a whole season, then canceling the service. But that still lets people wait until the whole season is over, watch it, then cancel. To avoid that behavior, IMO streaming will move more and more to the TV model: it's available for a limited time, maybe 1 week, maybe the last few episodes, then it's removed. If you want to watch the old stuff, pay more, either by the episode, by the season, etc. Amazon is already doing that with Fringe for example: you can watch Season 1 at no cost, but the other seasons will cost you. Media companies are gross. It's a damn shame the media producers didn't just put all their shit on Netflix for one low price, but greed all around would have likely never let that work either.
- amelius 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to find more seeders on Bittorrent.
  - blobbers 4y ago
    The age of downloading content to your device is largely dead mon frère! It's sad, because things like the despecialized editions of certain "Disney" movies will never see large scale distribution. The world of bit torrent + the world of copyright / residual payments doesn't seem to meld well. If they made a player that was "legal" and any content you played would pay residuals back to the creator, they could just normalize views and make it fully "not for profit". Seeders would be purely altruistic. You would pay for the residuals you watched, and there would be no middle men making billions (NFLX making 1.5B per quarter). Side note: Is sesame street highly pirated? Are you really looking forward to more seeders of sesame street? ... why???
    - amelius 4y ago
      Downloading is still very much possible. The number of seeders is down since a decade ago, but the content is still there. You just have to wait a bit longer in some cases, that's all.
nonameiguess 4y ago
There seems to be some confusion here about what is going on at HBO. The new leadership is cutting a bunch of stuff, not just Sesame Street. There are two basic reasons for this. Either it was costing more to show than it was bringing back in terms of people actually watching it (presumably the case w/ Sesame Street) or the quality was deemed potentially damaging to the brand (i.e. Batgirl being axed without ever getting released at all). And yes, HBO Max is merging with Discovery+ into a combined platform. It will use the Discovery+ software (which is presumably better because HBO Max is terrible), but will offer all of the content that remains on both platforms by the time this happens, likely next summer. https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/2022-08-19/hbo-max-cuts-dozens-of-titles-in-a-cost-cutting-move-before-a-merger-with-discovery https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/2022-08-19/hbo-max-cut...
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  The HBO Max UX/UI has probably improved by 10x IMO over the last year and a half or so. Hopefully they’ll keep that UI and maybe only change the backend streaming engine (if indeed the Discovery one is actually better).
- ibero 4y ago
  > It will use the Discovery+ software (which is presumably better because HBO Max is terrible) i know the new leadership claims Discover's tech is better, but i wonder if that is true. i wonder if it is PR-speak for creating some picture of reciprocity ("yes, HBO has content-- but discovery is bringing something to the party too!)." i know the HBO Max app gets a lot of well-deserved flack. still, i imagine the underlining infrastructure is much more robust than anything discovery deals with in terms of load, scale, and internationalization. dropping a new episode of House of Dragon tonight, or the new Wonder Woman movie in 4k HDR/etc. at a specific time must require far more interesting tech than whatever usage patterns the latest episode of 90 Day Fiancee necessitates.
  - lostdog 4y ago
    Well, Today, HBO Max has a bug where every time you go to the site, it pretends you're logged out. You click login, and it logs you in without having to put in any credentials (so it knew you were logged in). Then, when you click a show, you have to tell it which profile you're using (which it also already knew, because it was showing you lists customized for the profile), and then it returns you to the home screen where you must go find the same show again. This has been going on for a couple weeks. It's not stopping me from watching, but it is an obvious bug that should have been caught by any testing at all, and should be a P0 fix this tomorrow production bug. I'm glad they did eventually fix the last bug: It was impossible to select a profile and start watching unless you resized the browser window down to half size. I can't imagine how they accomplished that one!
troelsSteegin 4y ago
Sesame Street feels like a important piece of American culture. "Mr Rogers", too. Like, if there was a National Film Archive for TV... What preserves these shows, what guarantees access to these shows? The shows are of course also someone's private property. This action by HBO Max reduces them to nothing more than a means to extract marginal value from a market. Sesame Workshop and HBO Max/WarnerMedia/Discovery+ could better serve the public and their markets by committing to metered access to the full library. Two episodes a day should be enough for anyone...
- kevincox 4y ago
  Maybe if copyright was set to a reasonable period such as 50 years (or even much less) we could archive and make publicly available our important cultural works after that period of time.
- plokiju 4y ago
  > What preserves these shows, what guarantees access to these shows? r/datahoarder
Animats 4y ago
It's time to shorten copyright back to 50 years.
- ausbah 4y ago
  really should be like 5, maybe 10 years
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Pirate chads cannot stop winning.
rc_kas 4y ago
I was on the verge of getting an hbo max subscription. .. I dunno lol, I'm going to look harder at apples one
electriclove 4y ago
Can we create DAOs to buy this type of content and make it freely available?
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Fuck DAOs.
- Sargos 4y ago
  A DAO might be overkill. All you really need is a smart contract list and an IPFS frontend and data hoarders and intrinsically motivated individuals will complete the archiving and maintenance for you. Allow users to create curated collections from this list to allow discoverability and eliminate spam.
fezfight 4y ago
The streaming eternal September is here. It will never be as good as it used to be.
haunter 4y ago
At this point I only pay for live sports (and even that is sometimes useless when some games exclusive to X channels, and there are good pirate streams too.) Everyting else I just torrent it, there are more than enough private trackers and even some perfectly fine public ones that cover the mainstream TV and cinema content
throwaway657547 4y ago
lots of blame being heaped on the distributor here (hbo max/wbd) but this decision was likely driven by economics -the rebroadcast fees paid out to sesame workshop vs revenue created by said content. more focus should be on sesame workshop for demanding (presumably) overly expensive rebroadcast fees
BooneJS 4y ago
Discovery+ pulled The Repair Shop without notice. Related?
ambivdexterous 4y ago
- throwingrocks 4y ago
  Stop using HN
nightski 4y ago
This is a huge concern to me. Not sesame street, but that only popular content is being retained on these services. It feels like the opposite of what a digital library should accomplish. We are losing niche content which is arguably the most interesting. Instead we get a bunch of watered down mass appeal content.
UberFly 4y ago
I was most surprised that HBO Max is merging with Discovery+. Given enough time all these splintered streaming services will probably end up as one again just trying to make the bottom line work.
lakomen 4y ago
Non paywall link? I have HBO Max and it's worse than HBO go. I can't find anything there. And the stuff that they have is all negative mood or lbgtq crap that doesn't interest me, or superhero bs, which also doesn't interest me.
gamblor956 4y ago
Discovery is trying really hard to get me to cancel my HBO Max subscription. How about they start dropping all those crappy reality TV shows instead? They have a few hundred of them that nobody watches.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  You would be amazed how popular reality TV is.
  - stevehawk 4y ago
    no, I would be disappointed.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      You and me both, mate.
gxt 4y ago
If MBAs aimed for sustainable business practices they wouldn't be needed as much, so it's a never ending cycle with customers of feeding them the carrot, hitting them with it, before taking a hit and then trying to lure them back with it.
p1necone 4y ago
Do many adults watch old episodes of Sesame Street? I can't imagine the actual target demographic of Sesame Street caring that much (or even knowing) about whether there are a couple hundred episodes missing when there's still hundreds of episodes on there. I can definitely see the appeal of watching those old episodes for nostalgia's sake, but presumably HBO weighed up viewership numbers on old vs new episodes and decided they weren't worth the licensing fees. I wish there was an obvious solution for this kind of niche viewership stuff that isn't just "pirate it", because that's what I usually end up resorting to for older shows. What streaming service is going to go through the effort of licensing every mildly popular 80s crime drama I want to check out after a wikipedia binge?
- oogali 4y ago
  No, but speaking from my personal experience: Sesame Street was something I was grateful to have as a child. And as a adult, something wholesome and educational I was hoping to share with my children. Almost as in “hey, this was my favorite thing as a kid”, cue counting to 12, the yip-yip aliens, and silly Super Grover. The fact that it was broadcast on public television is why I naively thought it could be excluded from pure business decisions. But I as others are realizing: nothing is safe, not even public television.
WhyDoIThink 4y ago
H.B.O. Max is mainstream media propaganda helping corporate oligarchy at the expense of creative freedom for artists. The real reason why H.B.O. laid off staff members was because of very rich people hoarding their money and capitalism that both caused economic collapse in western countries. Capitalism inherently opens Pandora's box by causing debt, classism, etc. It's greedy assholes who justify capitalism. Not that I'm supporting communism. But capitalism is the culprit to H.B.O's billion-dollar debt. I could care less if "Seasame Street" episodes get pulled from H.B.O. Max. There are more important matters to focus on like global warming, increasing wealth inequality, people dying because they're being bullied into poverty, insanely rich oligarchs, etc.

245 points by carride 4y ago

I thought this was going to be about older children’s programs not conforming to current mores. Like Cookie Monster promoting obesity or Oscar the Grouch being bullied or something. This is a straightforward business decision. I’m not sure why it’s especially interesting. HBO presumably has the data to make the right business trade offs.

snoopy_telex 4y ago
HBO Max has been dropping content ever sense the Warner merge. I totally believe the plan is to kill it and move everything to a discovery+ combined platform.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  My understanding is they are going to Kill Discovery+ in favor of HBOMax as a Person that only has Discovery+ and has no interest in HBOMax I hate they are doing that. Discovery+ is a great low cost streaming service that I get a ton of value from.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    We subscribe to both. Discovery+ is our “white noise” streaming source to put on when we feel we need to have “chatter” and “activity” in the background during a WFH workday. Pull up any of the hundred generic home improvement shows, hit play, leave it on all day. Stuff goes on you don’t need to pay hard attention to, or can pay soft attention to if you’re trying to think about something else to trigger a lateral thought, just like looking up from a laptop in a cafe or open plan office. With HBO content, you might accidentally feel you should watch something. Never happens with Discovery+!
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      While I certainly use it for that as well, there are a few shows that I do like to actually watch and pay attention to. Re-watching Dirty Jobs or Mythbusters, or watching Good eats, or Worst Cooks In America....
    - sdrabing 4y ago
      I've always thought it was strange that so many people just watch TV for noise. Any love for silence anymore?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        Silence is unnatural. Most of humanity's ancestors grew up in the wilderness that was replete with noises.
        ghaff 4y ago
        There's nature not-silence--or a computer-generated version of same--and there's TV (or even music for the most part). Also tons of sounds in my house even if I don't put something on but mostly want to work without added inputs.
        Terretta 4y ago
        Exactly. Some steady sounds mask the intermittent sounds that are otherwise more interruptive.
        antihipocrat 4y ago
        A forest on a still night is much quieter than most urban areas.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
- rhino369 4y ago
  The plan isn't to kill it, but they are going to combine them. They are reducing redundancy, getting bad assets off their books, and reducing costs. These streaming services (minus Netflix) are not profitable. Some of the Hollywood trades reported that HBOMax Kids programming isn't highly watched. Let a service with better kid viwership numbers license it instead.
dTal 4y ago
>programs not conforming to current mores. Like Cookie Monster promoting obesity That was addressed 17 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_Monster#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_Monster#Development
- lkbm 4y ago
  One thing I found frustrating about that whole controversy was that this song is from 1987[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMxpDbp51A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMxpDbp51A

derbOac 4y ago

One thing that's always been confusing to me is this: I assume that Sesame Street must have received a significant amount of public funding over the years, from governments, while it was being broadcast on public television. As such, it seems like there should be some kind of legal obligation to keep it public. This is one of my pet peeves — when a project receives significant public funding and then it is just essentially reverted into an entirely private benefit. It shows up in a number of domains of activities (telecommunications, research grants, and so forth) and always seems to me that there should be significant legal consequences for not maintaining public benefit or access in some way. I might be wrong in this particular case though — maybe the public funding was always indirect, through the broadcasters?

colechristensen 4y ago
Sesame Street was developed by a 501c3 (Children’s Television Workshop renamed to Sesame Workshop) and sold to PBS. Episodes were licensed by a publicly funded organization, they weren’t produced by one.
- gdubs 4y ago
  Fascinating — but I'd be curious how much of the production was funded with those licensing fees. Maybe they're not legally obligated to keep it public — but ethically?
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    If I sell software to a government agency am I morally obligated to give up my copyright?
    - prepend 4y ago
      If you subsist entirely on grants and charitable donations and you yourself are a charity then I think it’s reasonable that your software should be open source. There’s actually a push for all custom developed code for the US government be open sourced, even if produced by a contractor. Seems reasonable to me.

umeshunni 4y ago

That might be why sesame street tweeted that they are still available on YouTube https://mobile.twitter.com/sesamestreet/status/1560746048922034185?s=20&t=bTnKvjtTzbm7Htdh__inFw https://mobile.twitter.com/sesamestreet/status/1560746048922...

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Yeah, no. Gotta be pre-Elmo. :-/
- smegger001 4y ago
  elmos is the reason my children don't watch sesame street.
  - t-writescode 4y ago
    Why?
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      Elmo is kind of arrogant. The other muppets had the same fears, anxieties (and hopes, wishes) as the children watching. We related to them. We saw how they solved their problems. Elmo is kind of awesome, perfect, full of energy, unflappable. And he seems to know it.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

I’m almost more disappointed to learn there were only 650 episodes available to begin with. IIRC, Sesame Street has thousands of episodes. At some point when I was watching as a child, they would display the episode number on screen at the end of the intro song, and it was huge. Where can someone access all of that cultural history?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
colechristensen 4y ago
>Where can someone access all of that cultural history? DVD box sets. Pirate sites.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I admittedly haven't looked into this at all, but I suspect a majority aren't available on DVD, particularly the ones from the 80s and 90s. "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    > "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming should be making economically viable for the first time. Broadly, it does, but the countless historic episodes (of many things) are not sitting there as nicely encoded video files with cleared distribution rights. Much work will not have been well-archived in the first place (if at all), nor catalogued well (if at all), and there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it. In all, it makes the per-item preparatory effort quite high and means that most old stuff will be left to volunteer, underground distribution for a very long time.
    - 4y ago

colechristensen 4y ago

I keep seeing this and people griping about it so much bothers me. They pulled some decades old episodes. There are still some decades old episodes. New episodes are still being made, after an exclusivity period they’re still on PBS. Seasons 39 though 52 are still available. I’m willing to bet very few of the people complaining actually ever watched any of the cut episodes which is probably why they were dropped. This just seems like a good opportunity for people to be upset about something, but it doesn’t make any sense. Go buy the DVDs if you care so much and stop acting like HBO reducing the number of seasons available to 17 is like they canceled it.

wishfish 4y ago
Why does it bother you? Part of the appeal of the streaming services is the long tail. That shows produced / funded by the service will remain indefinitely. That's become one of the expectations. When expectations are broken, people become unhappy. In the case of Sesame Street, at least the missing episodes are available on Youtube. That mitigates things somewhat. But it's a shame the other shows were removed completely with no legal way to find them. I hope the resulting blowback is enough to keep streaming services from doing this again.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I feel like I explained what bothered me extensively.
  - monkeywork 4y ago
    Did you though? All you said was: >I keep seeing this and people griping about it so much bothers me. Why does someone griping about the fact that their expectations of a service (especially one you personally aren't providing) doesn't match reality bother you at all? Why do you have an opinion on their opinion of a third party that they pay money to for a service?
ClassyJacket 4y ago
I think buying DVDs of 4000 episodes is gonna be pretty impractical

greymalik 4y ago

https://archive.ph/2022.08.21-151424/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/arts/television/sesame-street-hbo-max.html https://archive.ph/2022.08.21-151424/https://www.nytimes.com...

prirun 4y ago

Streaming services have already stopped publishing entire seasons, going back to the TV model of an episode a week. This is to prevent people from subscribing to a service, watching a whole season, then canceling the service. But that still lets people wait until the whole season is over, watch it, then cancel. To avoid that behavior, IMO streaming will move more and more to the TV model: it's available for a limited time, maybe 1 week, maybe the last few episodes, then it's removed. If you want to watch the old stuff, pay more, either by the episode, by the season, etc. Amazon is already doing that with Fringe for example: you can watch Season 1 at no cost, but the other seasons will cost you. Media companies are gross. It's a damn shame the media producers didn't just put all their shit on Netflix for one low price, but greed all around would have likely never let that work either.

amelius 4y ago
I'm looking forward to find more seeders on Bittorrent.
- blobbers 4y ago
  The age of downloading content to your device is largely dead mon frère! It's sad, because things like the despecialized editions of certain "Disney" movies will never see large scale distribution. The world of bit torrent + the world of copyright / residual payments doesn't seem to meld well. If they made a player that was "legal" and any content you played would pay residuals back to the creator, they could just normalize views and make it fully "not for profit". Seeders would be purely altruistic. You would pay for the residuals you watched, and there would be no middle men making billions (NFLX making 1.5B per quarter). Side note: Is sesame street highly pirated? Are you really looking forward to more seeders of sesame street? ... why???
  - amelius 4y ago
    Downloading is still very much possible. The number of seeders is down since a decade ago, but the content is still there. You just have to wait a bit longer in some cases, that's all.

nonameiguess 4y ago

There seems to be some confusion here about what is going on at HBO. The new leadership is cutting a bunch of stuff, not just Sesame Street. There are two basic reasons for this. Either it was costing more to show than it was bringing back in terms of people actually watching it (presumably the case w/ Sesame Street) or the quality was deemed potentially damaging to the brand (i.e. Batgirl being axed without ever getting released at all). And yes, HBO Max is merging with Discovery+ into a combined platform. It will use the Discovery+ software (which is presumably better because HBO Max is terrible), but will offer all of the content that remains on both platforms by the time this happens, likely next summer. https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/2022-08-19/hbo-max-cuts-dozens-of-titles-in-a-cost-cutting-move-before-a-merger-with-discovery https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/2022-08-19/hbo-max-cut...

indigodaddy 4y ago
The HBO Max UX/UI has probably improved by 10x IMO over the last year and a half or so. Hopefully they’ll keep that UI and maybe only change the backend streaming engine (if indeed the Discovery one is actually better).
ibero 4y ago
> It will use the Discovery+ software (which is presumably better because HBO Max is terrible) i know the new leadership claims Discover's tech is better, but i wonder if that is true. i wonder if it is PR-speak for creating some picture of reciprocity ("yes, HBO has content-- but discovery is bringing something to the party too!)." i know the HBO Max app gets a lot of well-deserved flack. still, i imagine the underlining infrastructure is much more robust than anything discovery deals with in terms of load, scale, and internationalization. dropping a new episode of House of Dragon tonight, or the new Wonder Woman movie in 4k HDR/etc. at a specific time must require far more interesting tech than whatever usage patterns the latest episode of 90 Day Fiancee necessitates.
- lostdog 4y ago
  Well, Today, HBO Max has a bug where every time you go to the site, it pretends you're logged out. You click login, and it logs you in without having to put in any credentials (so it knew you were logged in). Then, when you click a show, you have to tell it which profile you're using (which it also already knew, because it was showing you lists customized for the profile), and then it returns you to the home screen where you must go find the same show again. This has been going on for a couple weeks. It's not stopping me from watching, but it is an obvious bug that should have been caught by any testing at all, and should be a P0 fix this tomorrow production bug. I'm glad they did eventually fix the last bug: It was impossible to select a profile and start watching unless you resized the browser window down to half size. I can't imagine how they accomplished that one!

troelsSteegin 4y ago

Sesame Street feels like a important piece of American culture. "Mr Rogers", too. Like, if there was a National Film Archive for TV... What preserves these shows, what guarantees access to these shows? The shows are of course also someone's private property. This action by HBO Max reduces them to nothing more than a means to extract marginal value from a market. Sesame Workshop and HBO Max/WarnerMedia/Discovery+ could better serve the public and their markets by committing to metered access to the full library. Two episodes a day should be enough for anyone...

kevincox 4y ago
Maybe if copyright was set to a reasonable period such as 50 years (or even much less) we could archive and make publicly available our important cultural works after that period of time.
plokiju 4y ago
> What preserves these shows, what guarantees access to these shows? r/datahoarder

Animats 4y ago

It's time to shorten copyright back to 50 years.

ausbah 4y ago
really should be like 5, maybe 10 years

MichaelCollins 4y ago

Pirate chads cannot stop winning.

rc_kas 4y ago

I was on the verge of getting an hbo max subscription. .. I dunno lol, I'm going to look harder at apples one

electriclove 4y ago

Can we create DAOs to buy this type of content and make it freely available?

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Fuck DAOs.
Sargos 4y ago
A DAO might be overkill. All you really need is a smart contract list and an IPFS frontend and data hoarders and intrinsically motivated individuals will complete the archiving and maintenance for you. Allow users to create curated collections from this list to allow discoverability and eliminate spam.

fezfight 4y ago

The streaming eternal September is here. It will never be as good as it used to be.

haunter 4y ago

At this point I only pay for live sports (and even that is sometimes useless when some games exclusive to X channels, and there are good pirate streams too.) Everyting else I just torrent it, there are more than enough private trackers and even some perfectly fine public ones that cover the mainstream TV and cinema content

throwaway657547 4y ago

lots of blame being heaped on the distributor here (hbo max/wbd) but this decision was likely driven by economics -the rebroadcast fees paid out to sesame workshop vs revenue created by said content. more focus should be on sesame workshop for demanding (presumably) overly expensive rebroadcast fees

BooneJS 4y ago

Discovery+ pulled The Repair Shop without notice. Related?

ambivdexterous 4y ago

throwingrocks 4y ago
Stop using HN

nightski 4y ago

This is a huge concern to me. Not sesame street, but that only popular content is being retained on these services. It feels like the opposite of what a digital library should accomplish. We are losing niche content which is arguably the most interesting. Instead we get a bunch of watered down mass appeal content.

UberFly 4y ago

I was most surprised that HBO Max is merging with Discovery+. Given enough time all these splintered streaming services will probably end up as one again just trying to make the bottom line work.

lakomen 4y ago

Non paywall link? I have HBO Max and it's worse than HBO go. I can't find anything there. And the stuff that they have is all negative mood or lbgtq crap that doesn't interest me, or superhero bs, which also doesn't interest me.

gamblor956 4y ago

Discovery is trying really hard to get me to cancel my HBO Max subscription. How about they start dropping all those crappy reality TV shows instead? They have a few hundred of them that nobody watches.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
You would be amazed how popular reality TV is.
- stevehawk 4y ago
  no, I would be disappointed.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    You and me both, mate.

gxt 4y ago

If MBAs aimed for sustainable business practices they wouldn't be needed as much, so it's a never ending cycle with customers of feeding them the carrot, hitting them with it, before taking a hit and then trying to lure them back with it.

p1necone 4y ago

Do many adults watch old episodes of Sesame Street? I can't imagine the actual target demographic of Sesame Street caring that much (or even knowing) about whether there are a couple hundred episodes missing when there's still hundreds of episodes on there. I can definitely see the appeal of watching those old episodes for nostalgia's sake, but presumably HBO weighed up viewership numbers on old vs new episodes and decided they weren't worth the licensing fees. I wish there was an obvious solution for this kind of niche viewership stuff that isn't just "pirate it", because that's what I usually end up resorting to for older shows. What streaming service is going to go through the effort of licensing every mildly popular 80s crime drama I want to check out after a wikipedia binge?

oogali 4y ago
No, but speaking from my personal experience: Sesame Street was something I was grateful to have as a child. And as a adult, something wholesome and educational I was hoping to share with my children. Almost as in “hey, this was my favorite thing as a kid”, cue counting to 12, the yip-yip aliens, and silly Super Grover. The fact that it was broadcast on public television is why I naively thought it could be excluded from pure business decisions. But I as others are realizing: nothing is safe, not even public television.

WhyDoIThink 4y ago

H.B.O. Max is mainstream media propaganda helping corporate oligarchy at the expense of creative freedom for artists. The real reason why H.B.O. laid off staff members was because of very rich people hoarding their money and capitalism that both caused economic collapse in western countries. Capitalism inherently opens Pandora's box by causing debt, classism, etc. It's greedy assholes who justify capitalism. Not that I'm supporting communism. But capitalism is the culprit to H.B.O's billion-dollar debt. I could care less if "Seasame Street" episodes get pulled from H.B.O. Max. There are more important matters to focus on like global warming, increasing wealth inequality, people dying because they're being bullied into poverty, insanely rich oligarchs, etc.