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?
> As such, it seems like there should be some kind of legal obligation to keep it public.
The challenge here is royalties. You have to pay people royalties for broadcasting their work. You could take the position that publicly funded media should be in the public domain, but then it's going to cost considerably more because you'll have to compensate people for the royalties they won't receive.
> I might be wrong in this particular case though — maybe the public funding was always indirect, through the broadcasters?
Yes, Sesame Street wasn't commissioned by PBS, it was originated by the Children's Television Workshop which was funded via grants (some from the state, but mainly by non-profits like the Carnegie Corporation). And originally it aired on the precursor to PBS (National Educational Television), which was funded by the Ford Foundation.
> You have to pay people royalties for broadcasting their work.
Might be a dumb question - but is this a contractual thing? Why do people still need to get royalties for broadcasts of something made 40 years ago vs just paying them for it back then?
Yes. In general the content owners (less often so actors, screenwriters, etc.) work on a combination of upfront fees and royalties. This is true of book authors as well who typically get an advance against royalties. Purchasers generally won't pay a fee commensurate with "if this is a big hit" so the content owners are willing to accept a smaller fee in exchange for a cut of the big hit proceeds--even if those often don't come about.
Yes, it's contractual because of copyright. If someone (and many parties in the process) created it back then, there is a web of copyrights that require royalties to the creators. Contracts would control who this obligation is owed to (if anyone) years later.
What? It has nothing to do with copyright. It's a provision negotiated by unions for the benefit of members which means you can't employ anyone in certain unions without a minimum royalty schedule.
Notably, live action productions covered under SAG-AFTRA and WGA get residuals while animated works under IATSE did not until very recently.
Nonprofit funding is, in significant measure, a form of public funding as the organization's income is not taxed and its donors receive a tax deduction.
There is no functional difference between a tax break and a subsidy. And everything is private property only if a sovereign authority says it is. Much of it is not even remotely justifiable even by the most generous Lockean assumptions. But it remains private property because an entity with the power to do so has deemed it so.
> Private property proceeds the existence of the modern state.
Stop intimating that private and personal property are the same. Private property is enforcable only by coordinated violence. Its manifestations in the past (serfdom, slavery etc) have been universally agreed to be negative.
> Both s public and private property proceed modern states, and can have their origin in customary law as much as legal statutes.
You're still conflating personal and private property here.
This presumes that all income belongs to the government by default, and not being taxed is some special favor.
That’s backwards, all income belongs to the people who earn it by default. We agree to use a portion for the common good to fund the government. Since a nonprofit is presumably already working for the common good, there is no reason to take any of their income to fund the government.
Then why does society allow someone to reduce their tax liability for “charity”?
Of course, it would be better if there were no deductions in the first place, and the government just paid for content if it wanted to pay for content which was then automatically in the public domain.
Just for clarification, do you mean this tautologically? As in, if I produce examples of people not materially or socially benefiting from their charitable donations (such as by donating anonymously in countries without charitable tax deductions) would your argument reduce to "They only give to charity to feel better about themselves, therefore they benefited and would not have made the donation otherwise"?
I'm willing to give up the tautological definition in the edge case of "donated food anonymously to the poor" type cases. But I think that the number of ways of selfishly donating are both the vast majority and far broader than "material or social" benefiting.
Okay, now I'm more interested. Your original claim was;
>If you didn't benefit from the donation, you wouldn't have made it.
If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that the vast majority of charitable donations a) do not materially or socially benefit the donater, b) are still selfish (in that donating the money offers greater personal advantage than using the money in other ways), and c) would not be given if those benefits were not received in return. Could you give some examples of what kind of donations you're talking about, because I'm not sure we're communicating from the same basic understanding of what a charitable donation is.
Do you really want government as the primary arbiter of what goes on PBS? At that point, it might as well be a government news channel. Though for better or worse, broadcast channels--including PBS--are less and less relevant. The federal government in the US is perfectly within its rights to commission and host content on .gov--which in general would be public domain.
Because lobbyists receive a healthy sum to achieve and defend their benefactors’ ability to influence societal development by indulging in subsidised philanthropy they can focus on issues and aspects they desire (rather than going through the State and governmental assignment of funds).
> Of course, it would be better if there were no deductions in the first place, and the government just paid for content if it wanted to pay for content which was then automatically in the public domain.
You are arguing in favor of government propaganda, because that's what will happen in your scenario.
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.
Revenue from public television was used to fund new episodes. So the question is why it’s OK for public TV to have these kinds of arrangements not why Sesame Workshop can own it’s content.
Any way money can be extracted from a nonprofit to create private IP is dubious be that a University or public television.
I don't understand the the objection. Public TV licensed content. If they wanted to own the IP, they should have bought the content.
What the revenue was used for is irrelevant. If I pay an employee a salary, I dont get part of their house. If I pay a Mcdonalds for a burger, I dont get shares of the corporation.
The difference between subcontracting and embezzlement is the closeness of the relationship. If I receive public funds with the goal to advance public education and I use it to set up public schools, that is a valid pursuit of that goal. If I receive those same funds and use them as grants for private schools meeting specific goals, that can also be a valid pursuit of the goal. But I choose to direct those funds to private schools, and I sit on the board of some of those private schools, then that makes a strong case for it being embezzlement.
Where the close relationship comes from may differ. It may even be from trying to avoid conflicts of interest (e.g. an agency whose policy forbids holding assets, and therefore has been the sole funding of a nominally independent production company). Requiring publicly funded would to enter the public domain would be a way to prevent this entire class of misdeeds.
I am proposing that public TV has overpayed for Sesame Street. It can be illegal when a nonprofit does that when paying rent on a building, but it is more difficult to value IP transactions.
Sesame Workshop did nothing wrong, public TV did by agreeing to such a contract at the beginning of their relationship.
PBS has been licensing Sesame Street since before digital distribution was even a “thing” to put into a contract. PBS can certainly be licensing those rights now but they’d have to pay more, not less. They paid for the broadcast rights and still do.
There’s always been rights they’ve left to Childrens Workshop such as product licensing which subsidizes the production costs making PBS’s outlay less, not more. PBSs mission is to broadcast public interest programming that’s it. They license all their content similarly.
Let alone the fact that Children’s Workshop is a non-profit with public reporting requirements so it’s not like they have something to hide.
We can dig into past cash flows and argue about it, but I just want to a dress your final point.
An AIDS research nonprofit shouldn’t be handing lots of money to Wikipedia just because Wikipedia does good work. I think Childrens Workshop has done great things and they should be creating and licencing content for around the world. However, my point is simply PBS has it’s own mission and could have been a more effective steward of it’s funds.
Why do you think public TV overpaid? If they didn't like the terms they could always not renew the license, and ultimately I guess they did.
Similar arrangements are quite common in the startup world were you invent something novel. You then make a second company with a license for a specific purpose and sell the second company with the license and retain the core IP. There's nothing fraudulent about it as long as the buyers know they're getting a license and not the core IP
“There’s nothing fraudulent as long as the buyers know they’e getting a license and not the core IP”
That’s making a lot of assumptions, imagine the CEO of IBM set up his own company which he the sold to IBM. That kind of transaction is just ripe for conflicts of interest.
Now to be clear Sesame Workshop is a nonprofit so this specific deal is less of a concern. However, public TV didn’t get the better end of this deal which is my concern as it demonstrates the obvious loophole.
>However, public TV didn’t get the better end of this deal which is my concern as it demonstrates the obvious loophole.
Why do you consider it a loophole? It seems like a clear win win in retrospect? They got decades of high quality licensed programing that they wanted.
Why do you think they didnt get the better end of the deal, or at least a good deal? Maybe they could have payed more for more rights, but that doesn't account for other shows where full rights are worthless. Should PBS have done the same for every show they contracted with where the IP ended up worthless?
Companies don't acquire every vendor or contractor they work with for good reason. There is a reason that Netflix or HBO dont buy perpetual IP to everything they air. You dont know what will be a winner or loser, so you pay less and license opposed to buy.
It is easy to armchair past decisions with future knowledge, but those making the decision didn't have that knowledge. You and I should have invested in apple, google, amazon, tesla, ect for pennies. however, we would be broke if we invested in every company that could be worth something.
> That’s making a lot of assumptions, imagine the CEO of IBM set up his own company which he the sold to IBM. That kind of transaction is just ripe for conflicts of interest.
But, that's not what is happening HERE, which is closer to IBM still contractually paying patent royalties to a former employee of the purchased company.
Sure but it illustrates things are complex. My personal belief is PBS should at a minimum have gotten perpetual rights to the episodes inside the US for any purpose.
PS: IMO, toy sales is somewhat sketchy because the show acted like a commercial in the same way Transformers or My Little Pony did, but that's a different issue. Should they include shows with a toy line is more a question of their mission than how cost effective the deal is.
You changed my comment in your quote. You quoted me as having written, "not what happened HERE". But, I wrote, "that's not what is happening HERE" in present tense. This is currently happening, which is present tense.
Though it can be used as a quote, it can also be adjusted to make a point as people can just look up. Anyway are talking about a 50 year relationship not just what happened recently.
Some do, Saturday Night Live is a similarly long running and prolific show owned by NBC.
As to why PBS should have negotiated, they where getting well over 100 new 1 hour episodes per year as PBS was also running a lot of reruns. I am not saying very young kids don’t deserve that much new content but PBS would have been better off owning fewer episodes they could rerun than paying for that deluge and then also paying to rerun episodes. It's one thing not to negotiate after year one, but by year 30?
In which year should they have renegotiated and how much of a premium should they have paid for total ownership? I think your argument is predicated on PBS being able to read the future and their partner being able to lose more control without the product suffering.
No. Directing funds to a private school you are a board member of makes zero case for embezzlement. It doesn't even hint at it. It may be unethical, but you aren't stealing the funds but are you misappropriating them. As you said yourself if the funds go to a private school it is fine.
I think it’s because a non-profit receives tax subsidies in that donations are tax deductible and they don’t pay income tax and frequently pay reduced property tax.
If they make millions or billions from licensing to HBO then they don’t pay taxes on that. They can also distribute those gains to employees and management in the form of bonuses or featherbedding.
And they don’t pay taxes on the sale.
So it seems more like a tax dodge than just a moral argument that government shouldn’t fund private enterprises. Or at least claim that it’s for public good.
Thats just an argument that Non-profits should exist.
I think this misunderstands that the entire point of having a non-profit tax status is to create a tax dodge.
We want them to avoid taxes because we want to promote the products they generate.
>If they make millions or billions from licensing to HBO then they don’t pay taxes on that. They can also distribute those gains to employees and management in the form of bonuses or featherbedding.
Why should we care that they don't pay taxes? If they give it to employees, then they have to pay income tax at a much higher rate than a for profit would.
At the end of the day, the public wanted high quality educational content produced, we set up tax incentives to support it, and the content was made.
> Why should we care that they don't pay taxes? If they give it to employees, then they have to pay income tax at a much higher rate than a for profit would.
Can you provide a source for this? I'm not finding anything that suggests that an employee of a non-profit organization would be taxed at a higher rate than an employee of a for-profit organization.
For profit companies can and do deduct employee taxes as a cost of business before calculating their corporate tax liability.
>Why should the Sesame Street production company get tax benefits over any Hollywood production?
Specifically because we decided as a society that we wanted to encourage companies making educational content and not Hollywood blockbusters.
There are strings attached to being a nonprofit. These include limits on employee compensation so that the CEO of a nonprofit can't take a billion dollar salary as a workaround for corporate profit. They have to be paid a salary that the IRS thinks is reasonable, and any excess Revenue made by the nonprofit has to go back into its beneficial purpose
Employee salaries and benefits (costs generally) not employee taxes.
But agree in general. US 501c3 status is based on a variety of things that the federal government has determined are worth encouraging--including education--that it has historically deemed the private sector was not sufficiently interested in funding. This in turn comes with strings. Which is not to say there aren't large and wealthy institutions that benefit from this status or that donors to those organizations don't benefit as well from certain tax benefits such as donating appreciated assets.
>Employee salaries and benefits (costs generally) not employee taxes.
Can you sign elaborate because I'm generally curious. I run a business and and my portion of employment taxes, and all of salary including their taxes, are discounted before corporate profit and taxes are calculated.
If this were not the case, I would be paying taxes while my bottom line is negative
I was thinking of the taxes that the employees pay. You're of course correct that employee costs--including salary, benefits, and the portion of their employment tax that the business pays are tax deductible business expenses.
It's not aboung tainting what it buys, it’s about what it can pay for without owning. I have no issue with a nonprofit buying buildings, paying employees, or paying consultants market rates to design a logo it owns. You can value such transactions to verify people arn’t extracting money from a nonprofit this way.
However when it comes to creating IP that they don’t own it gets tricky because the IP owner also benefits from the exposure of being on public TV and can then turn that into toy sales etc. On the other hand if the IP flops then public TV has taken all the risk. In many other contexts having a nonprofit take in the risk while a for profit sees the profit is illigal. Just imagine doing this with startups rather than childrens TV shows.
The public isn't taking all the risk. The creator accepts a lower fee in exchange for the IP rights, commensurate to the future value of any spinoffs/merchandise, etc.
> How much should public funding be a taint to things it buys?
For higher education the rule is 100%, even when the funding isn't supposed to be buying anything in particular, or going to the organization which becomes attainted.
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?
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.
Keep in mind there is a balance where the "ask" for receiving government funding may prevent the creation of the work in the first place.
Sometimes, the right balance may be to require the work to contractually enter the public domain in return for receiving funding. Sometimes, the government could negotiate something less than in order to get a net benefit.
>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.
The Republican party has been battling to keep that significant amount of public funding as close to zero since PBS was founded. There was the famous Mr Rogers testimony in Washington DC (where the Corporation for Public Broadcasting managed to prevail) and there was the Gingrich era where the stated goal was to shut down CPB:
If a creative work or research endeavor costs $10,000 to produce, and public grants provide $1, does that dollar buy the public unrestricted rights to the work?
It sounds like you think it should, which is a fine position to take, but odds are that the contributors of the other $9,999 have a different opinion and may make different choices about contributing were that the case.
So — assuming that the public can’t justify the entire production cost of all grant-worthy work — what ends up happening is that you have a negotiation of rights and contracts and lawyers and all that banal, complicating stuff.
A more charitable view of the situation would be a requirement that any content which has taken public funding should always be able to be "reasonably accessed."
This allows private businesses to seek out solutions that are in their best interest, while also offering some protections to consumers. I don't see it as any different from the way we regulate other public utilities, like not allowing power companies to shut off service during the winter.
Note that I specifically used ambiguous language so that a wide range of uses for the content are possible. I don't necessarily have a problem with Sesame Street being behind a paywall, provided that the service isn't priced in an absurd manner.
This is good public policy thinking. At a minimum, if you want to take our tax dollars, you need to do _at least_ the bare minimum to benefit the public.
> Sesame Street must have received a significant amount of public funding over the years
You'd be surprised by how little it is. Most pbs and ctw funds are derived through nonprofit foundations and "viewers like you" (and corporate sponsorship), NPR likewise has relatively little government funding. A good chunk of what does wind up coming from government gets earmarked for things like rural media access.
While it's not zero, lots of things like science research, military weapons, get a much much bigger relative slice of their r&d funds from the public purse and still get to keep their IP.
Some segments and full episodes are free in the PBS Kids app on smart TVs. They appear to rotate over time, so I suspect there are rights issues involved. They may also not want to cannibalize viewing of local stations.
It is public. HBO pays just for exclusiveness for some time. You can still watch those lost episodes, PBS still had the right to distribute them. They’re not gone, just gone from HBO.
The Today, Explained podcast had an episode on Sesame Street a while ago, which got into how the show has been funded over the years and the compromises Children's Television Workshop has had to make. https://dcs.megaphone.fm/VMP1713252129.mp3
This is a great example of why neoliberalism is a scam. This is also true when a city or country begins to “privatize” it’s parks and fire department and water infrastructure, etc.
There's plenty of ideology sunglasses people wear to prevent themselves from seeing this.
It's hard to convince people of a reality wherein their identity demands them to oppose it.
HN has been more reasonable recently but there's still threads mobbed by Hayek and Rothbard partisans.
The giveaway is they have an unfalsifiable ideology. Bad results are because they didn't adhere enough, every problem has an identical solution, any purported tests aren't true tests, examples given aren't real examples so it can't be observed, it's just pure rhetorics and pseudo-intellectual dogma
Don't bother. It's team sports to them. See y'all in the replies with whataboutisms and personal attacks.
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?
> Hollywood should have had an archive.org sort of organization since way back.
In 2022 this is obvious, where we can economically store vast amounts of digital data. In the 20th century, the cost to store all that media would have been far greater, and they had no way to know the internet would come along and radically change the means and cost of distribution. From that perspective, I think the decision to not invest as much in archival is not surprising.
Even better (for this goal, maybe not in general) would be some kind of "use it or loose it" provision. Your copyright expires after 20 years, or 5 years after the last time your creative work was reasonably accessible to the general public, whichever is greater.
Whatever studio created it probably has a copy of every episode on old tapes. Also I wonder if this is viable business model to request people who have a copy of a “lost media” to turn it up for a reward.
It also severely distorts our idea of the past, which was mostly reinforced by reruns and rebroadcasts. Major celebrities from the past had their entire careers wiped, especially if they primarily worked in live TV, or on the DuMont network:
"In the earlier '70's, the Dumont network was being
bought by another company, and the lawyers were in heavy
negotiation as to who would be responsible for the library of the
Dumont shows currently being stored at the facility, who would
bear the expense of storing them in a temperature controlled
facility, take care of the copyright renewal, et cetera.
"One of the lawyers doing the bargaining said that he
could "take care of it" in a "fair manner," and he did take care
of it. At 2 a.m., the next morning, he had three huge semis back
up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored
kinescopes and 2" videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in
New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the
Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay.
Very neat. No problem."
-- Edie Adams, widow of Ernie Kovacs (largely forgotten extremely famous comedian) testifying before the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress.
Often media was reused by the studio, for cost reasons. This is one reason there are missing episodes of culturally significant television programs like Doctor Who.
> Whatever studio created it probably has a copy of every episode on old tapes. Also I wonder if this is viable business model to request people who have a copy of a “lost media” to turn it up for a reward.
Old tapes don't last forever, even the fancy professional ones.
(Sorry for the double reply, but as it's on a separate subject, I think it will make for easier threading.)
I watched that witch episode (skipping through the non-story segments), and I'm not sure what to make of it. What an odd storyline.
Here's what I kept expecting to happen: the witch asks nicely for her broom back, the man says "well of course, since you asked so nicely", and they all live happily ever after.
In a way, that's exactly what happens, but in a bizarre fashion and minus the happily-ever-after part. The witch does ask nicely and the man does return her broom, but then the witch turns around and is like "aha, I tricked you" (through the power of appealing to his basic sense of decency?) and flies off—only to drop her broom again during the final moments of the episode. What?
One thing I appreciate about Sesame Street is that it generally doesn't talk down to kids too much, and perhaps this exchange is an example of that. Kids aren't stupid—they realize that not all misunderstandings are easy to resolve, or worth resolving.
But I still can't figure out what Sesame Street was hoping to teach here!
Oh cool, your first link answers my original question:
> As part of Sesame Street's 50th anniversary, it was announced that the Sesame Workshop would be donating almost 4,500 episodes across 49 seasons to be preserved by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The episodes are available to members of the public in-person at the Library of Congress or at WGBH Boston.
Yes, it would be much better if they could be streamed over the internet, but I'm really glad to learn they're publicly available in some form.
> And wow you weren’t wrong. Early seasons were producing a new episode nearly every weekday for half the year. 130+ episodes per year.
Though, if I remember Sesame Street correctly, those episodes heavily reused content between episodes (e.g. I probably saw this segment literally hundreds of times as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM), so that might be less work than it seems.
Oh wow, that link. Before I clicked I was thinking: "there's no way I'd remember a specific sesame street segment I saw as a kid, no matter how many times."
As soon as I clicked it and saw the girls sitting at the table, I remembered the swirling orange colors.. and sure enough, next scene.
Thanks for this. I'd guess it's been at least 30 years since I'd seen it.
> Wow, that's a brilliant little piece of visual storytelling. No narration required for a child (or adult) to know exactly what's going on.
Well, not exactly. Just watching it again as an adult, I just realized that I don't really know what the man is dumping into wax mixer at 0:26. I'd always assumed it was wax, but now I think it's probably orange pigment.
And if I rmember correctly, the ladies singing the song were the Pointer Sisters. They really did have some great music on Sesame Street / Electric Company.
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.
> "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.
>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.
For example, there are pretty well-known TV series like Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati that are only available in essentially bowdlerized form because the music that was such a key part of the shows was never licensed beyond original TV use.
I don’t know much about marketing, let alone about marketing decades old television shows, but it would surprise me if doing the work to stream all of that were economically viable, let alone more economically viable than other things HBO could work on instead. Ten or twenty “best of” episodes (with “best of” decided by both content, licensing, and the quality of available recordings) might be economically viable, but thousands of episodes?
> "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.
I see what you mean, but if we are at all concerned about preservation of old media, a streaming platform is useless unless we are able to download it without any form of restriction. I doubt most platforms would be okay with that, because it would remove part of the incentive of continuing to subscribe to their platform.
If I recall correctly, Netflix and Hulu both have some form of "offline access" to certain content that their studios produced, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort heavy handed DRM associated with that.
To make things more frustrating, consider this: Plenty of streaming services that have already come and gone. Most of those platforms had some amount of original content on it. Once the platform shut their servers off, viewers lost any form of access to it (assuming that there wasn't a workaround to download a local copy.) Theoretically, that media could pop up on another platform in the future if some deal is worked out between studios, but, I find it extremely unlikely, and even less likely that all of it would ever be available on a singular source. That is to say, there is a near guarantee that there is a growing amount of media that we will never have never know about, let alone have the chance to see.
Technology seems to rotate through various trends. The only realistic possibility that I see of us finding any kind of long term solution to this issue is if there is a sudden, overwhelming shift back towards physical media (DVDs, Blu-ray, etc.) Without unrestricted physical access, the ability to access "lost" content is merely a expiration date, either by a subscription ending, or a platform dying off.
The less likely alternative that I can think of would be some kind of gentlemen's agreement. Each time a new piece of content is created, a preserved copy is provided to a third party source, to be made public if that piece of content is no longer accessible. Something along the lines of how the Library of Congress works. I just don't see any studio being particularly interested in humoring that type of arrangement, unless it was a legal requirement, or something that was demanded through unions like Screen Actors Guild, Writer's Guild of America, etc.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
> dropping a new episode of House of Dragon tonight ... at a specific time must require far more interesting tech than whatever usage patterns the latest episode of 90 Day Fiancee necessitates.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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+!
Back when I'd sometimes be on group trips rooming with other people, the nails on blackboard thing for me was when the first thing someone would do in a hotel room was turn on the TV. Admittedly, my brother does it at his house as well.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
The media market seems to be cyclical. Piracy is always an option, but most people prefer to pay for content if it is reasonably priced with few strings attached.
When a lot of people are paying for content, media companies look for ways to wring more money out of them. This degrades the quality of service and drives customers away.
When few people are paying for content, media companies look for ways to get paid. They become more open to offering discounted rates to platforms with new ideas, distribution models, etc. This improves the quality of service, and draws in more customers.
We fled from the sinking ship of cable to the HMS Streaming, like our parents fled the sinking ship of $20 CDs to the iTunes buffet. I'm excited to see what comes next - maybe a way to pay $5 per DRM-free downloadable episode? Sadly, it will probably be a painful decade until the winds of user experience finally change.
I don’t even know how I’d get back into piracy. I used to have a seed box, accounts on all the big trackers, then it just became less hassle to sign up to streaming services and I let it all lapse
> I don’t even know how I’d get back into piracy. I used to have a seed box, accounts on all the big trackers, then it just became less hassle to sign up to streaming services and I let it all lapse
Private trackers aren't necessary 99% of the time. Set up Jackett, point it at all the big popular public trackers, and you can find nearly anything.
There are an endless number of websites that stream virtually every show and movie for free in HD that you can access simply with a websearch and the proper ad blockers.
I often see the intros of shows like Foundation and The Expanse and imagine all of the particles are there as a big F.U. to pirates trying to reencode their paid stream.
Why is the world in love again?
Why are we marching hand in hand?
Why are the ocean levels rising up?
It's a brand new record for 1990
They Might Be Giants' brand new album Flood
I don't know anyone who pirates on torrents any more for things other than video games, just streaming sites. Use yandex and search for the show + stream. Google works too honestly but isn't as good since they respond to dmca requests
In my experience it's the other way around. Most people I know just buy the game on steam because it's a much better experience overall, you get updates, you don't have to worry about malware, etc.
With movies/shows however it's the other way around. You get a better experience if you pirate. You get all the languages and subtitles. No ads. No annoying autoplay of other unrelated content. You get the actual video file so you can watch it without internet connection, on other devices, you get to keep it forever, etc. No invasive DRM. Much faster playback because it doesn't need to buffer.
The point is that I don't know when I have the time or the will to watch a series. I watched the sixth season of The Expanse only this month. I think it was released close to the beginning of the year. While I was writing this comment I had to think about who streams the show. It's Amazon. In a perfect world I'd go to YouTube or any other similar service, look for the series at any time and watch the episodes by paying them 1 Euro each (or whatever.) Who cares who makes it, it's like gasoline's brand.
I can open up the TV app on my phone or laptop, search Expanse, and it gives me option to open Amazon to watch season 6. Or I can buy seasons 1 to 5 in the TV app itself.
I assume Google has a similar situation in the YouTube app?
Not in the YouTube app (random videos about the series) and not in Play (nothing about TV or movies - don't they sell movies?), but I'm always logged out so I might be missing something and/or don't know where to find it.
> Piracy is always an option, but most people prefer to pay for content if it is reasonably priced with few strings attached.
No. Only those people whose income high and work and leisure time is valuable like to pay. I find that all of these condition have to be met and not just one. I know enough people who with their high IT salaries still share Netflix or other service accounts among multiple families. And as expected they are ever ready with righteous explanation on how this is correct thing to do.
Then there are billion plus people in third world who can't pay whatever lowest price content owner might decide. So piracy is not second thought but like most natural first option to watch content.
With the increasingly saturating mix of content with ads, the future I see that there will be plenty of "cheap", "unlimited" plans to consume content for some definition of these terms.
> Then there are billion plus people in third world who can't pay whatever lowest price content owner might decide. So piracy is not second thought but like most natural first option to watch content.
When I lived in a third-world country there were loads of people with Netflix accounts. I didn't have one, but I did have Spotify which was significantly cheaper than Europe (~€1.75/month). Steam games are cheaper too, although I don't recall by how much as I never really use it.
This is why these platforms are so hawkish about regions, because otherwise everyone would be living in Africa or Asia to pay the cheaper prices.
> it's available for a limited time, maybe 1 week, maybe the last few episodes, then it's removed
As Gabe Newell famously said about Steam, the solution to piracy is not DRM, it's making a service which is better than piracy. Hence, the success of Steam, and the iTunes Store, and so on.
The above model is not better than piracy. It's far worse, and it costs more, and so the return of popular piracy is inevitable. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
1 - All streaming providers had a public API for show/movie listings. Apple manages to aggregate most content across providers, but I think Netflix refuses to play ball, making search harder than it need be.
2 - there isn’t really a 2. I rotate services regularly as shows go in and out of availability. If shows get yanked quickly, I just won’t subscribe to that service.
Streaming has done wonders for my consumption. It’s a fraction of what it was back in the cable TV days. I can’t tolerate ads any more, so don’t get cable and refuse to subscribe to services that inject ads into their content (even after a subscription). If they all are ok with losing me as a consumer forever, at this point in ok with that. I’ll just rent the odd movie or show and be fine.
That Netflix refuses to play ball with apple is why I unsubscribed from them. Who do they think they are, preventing their content from being findable via a global search?
Given how fast that rights-owners are delisting things from Netflix, my guess is that Netflix doesn't want people to know just how fast they're failing.
And having stale search with "Show XYZ On-demand", and when you get there, it disappeared last Friday. That's never good.
Plenty of people here don’t make that much but the sentiment is largely true. Lots of hand wringing in a thread a while back about the tragedy of paying like $14.99 so a family of 4 could watch the newest Spider-man movie I think.
Zero sympathy for the companies that seem to be burying content for tax benefits or residual avoidance, just saying the price for someone to watch video content has dropped in a pretty remarkable way, especially inflation adjusted, over the last few decades (theaters may be the exception), though people rarely “own” their copy of content these days.
My DVD collection of maybe 40 movies & shows will last as long as I don’t get rid of my PS3 but in 10 years I haven’t watched any of them.
There need to be legit competitors so the creators of new content can negotiate deals that don’t allow or incentivize the shelving of content. Currently if someone offers someone who isn’t a household name any contract to make their dream project they probably accept it with no redlining. Meanwhile John “Jim from The Office” Krasinski posted 8 episodes of maybe the dumbest, most tone deaf slop to YouTube in March of 2020 before immediately selling the “show” to Viacom and walking away.
The “golden age of TV” ended super suddenly, hopefully this is the end of the re-bundling and we’ll see another unbundling soon!
Contrasting point: lots of non-functional PlayStation games at this point, which despite not being scratched, have suffered disc rot. Buying them is becoming difficult.
Oh snap maybe burned ones last longer than stamped ones? I should rip all of mine but as one might expect I no longer have a DVD drive on a computer hah
You're missing the obvious business model: ad-supported compiler.
You're going to be staring at the compiler output anyway, potentially for minutes at a time waiting for the build/tests to fail. Throw some ads in the progress bar.
$600/year isn't nothing, even if you're pulling in a half million a year. After taxes, it's $300k, and after the cost of life it tends to get chipped away. Insurance and co-payments, food, shelter, car registration, rent or roperty tax+mortgage, clothing, internet, mobile phone, computer, children and their care, pets and their food+insurance+care, utility bills, property upkeep, auto purchase or repair, and on and on. Even without stepping on the hedonistic treadmill, it's crazy how much life today coats compared to a hundred years ago.
Living even a half full life is still expensive before you dump fifty to a hundred bucks a month to Comcast, Disney+, Hulu, YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix for access to entertainment on their timelines.
600 dollars a year isn't nothing, but TV is essentially the number one entertainment / pastime for the average American. It's a good bang for your buck.
And if you don't watch enough to justify 50 bucks, then subscribe to one service. Each one has more than enough content to keep a viewer busy.
It is weird that we are willing to spend $600 a year on something that is essentially a distraction, really a negative influence on our lives (not to get on a soap box, though, I do it too and I also buy alcohol and junk food, similarly bad for you and costly).
What? It’s like the only thing in your entire list that has gone down in price over time (computers & mobile phones probably count as “up” since not everyone needed them 30 years ago when they were expensive as hell).
It used to cost like $3 1999 dollars to rent one VHS for 3 days, now it’s $14.99 for a month of watching as many of hundreds of movies / shows as you have time for.
The prices are going to get weird soon though! Amazon Prime is weird because it’s “free” with Prime shipping, HBO is free with AT&T’s main mobile phone plans, Disney+ (and some others, $20/mo max) are free with AMEX Platinum card.
> It used to cost like $3 1999 dollars to rent one VHS for 3 days, now it’s $14.99 for a month of watching as many of hundreds of movies / shows as you have time for.
The difference is, I picked the $3 movie to watch. The streaming services are limiting what I can watch for $15. If I want something really good, I have to pay for it, individually.
I have long theorized Amazon Prime releases shows that are free on Prime until they are rated enough to decide whether the show is any good. If it's good, it's no longer on Prime and you have to pay. If it's shitty, okay, we'll leave it on Prime. I quit using Amazon's Watch List because I spent a significant amount of time scrolling through shows to add them to my watch list, only to find later that they were no longer on Prime and I'd have to pay for them individually. Fuck that.
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???
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.
> 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.
It's as much this as it is keeping discourse alive. A week of reaction and speculation on social media is just free advertising.
I think this is by far the more natural reason. It's just more engaging to wonder what will happen next when you have to wait. Binging content all at once is a great way to feel like the platform has nothing.
But it also leaves you hanging, I bet more shows get dropped because people watch a filler episode and feel like they spent a week getting excited for no reason, or worse the anticipation creates a recipe for letdown. Like watching porn before having sex.
Yes. I suspect that if binging + streaming service hopping becomes more of a thing--it's probably an outlier today--companies might shift to weekly drops more frequently. (Or doing annual subscriptions.) But, for me, I prefer that complex serialized shows are dribbled out. Otherwise I feel I have to stay away from any online discussions because some people will have binge-watched the season in a day.
Personally, I think this is a reasonable proposition, but I am afraid most people would respond to this by thinking, "How about just not living at all?"
> Streaming services have already stopped publishing entire seasons, going back to the TV model of an episode a week.
I don’t see Sesame Street’s audience as prone to binge watching. It may be a way to avoid paying for the material.
I hope that, in that case, the rights revert to the original owners (be them PBS or Henson) so they can make the material available elsewhere. HBO may keep the deal for the most current episodes as they have now.
BYW, since the current government seems sane, shouldn’t they properly fund PBS as something of strategic interest?
You joke, but PBS is exactly that - when other countries adopt its programming, it's helping push Western/American culture. I grew up in Brazil and we had a local licensed version produced with Brazilian actors interspersed with dubbed original material.
My point, which is not a joke, is any media funded by the government will soon find itself pushing only the point of view of those in power in the government.
Absolutely not. You can make funding independent from government (see BBC's TV tax, for instance) and have a board of trustees that cannot be nominated by any government (more or less the same model as the SCOTUS, or make it so that the board can't be changed by more than 25% of its members over an 8 year period), and create clauses that ensure it represents various groups of society, in particular the underrepresented. While you are at it, make some bylaws that the entity can't change itself that ensure the board can't hijack it. Hire professionals using clear competency measures and give them tenure.
I'm shocked, shocked I say, to hear that these companies are acting according to their own self interest.
> It's a damn shame the media producers didn't just put all their shit on Netflix for one low price
Except it wouldn't be 'one low price', it would be 'whatever Netflix feels like charging' because in that situation Netflix would have a monopoly on media distribution. And for the same reason, media producers would get paid whatever Netflix deigns to give them.
> I'm shocked, shocked I say, to hear that these companies are acting according to their own self interest
That's a non-answer. Media companies could act in their own self interest and also not be gross. Instead of taking things away (i.e. removing stuff that used to be available) they could offer extra benefits to subscribers who stayed long term.
Is it hard to think of these benefits without screwing us over? Maybe, but I don't care, they should move their asses or get the hell out of this business. I've zero sympathy for their "plight".
Because you know, us consumers always have the option of piracy: free, high quality, available whenever we want, and it's never going away. So media companies better shape up and offer us the better product.
> extra benefits to subscribers who stayed long term.
Indeed! That's partly the model of many game subscription services (PS+, etc), where (simplified description) each month you're subbed you can add a few games to your catalog, and you can only play your catalog while you're subbed.
> This is to prevent people from subscribing to a service, watching a whole season, then canceling the service.
I might be going against the grain but I actually like this... I prefer being able to digest a show at a slower pace so it can have more of a cultural impact. This allows me to talk to my friends about what we just watched and follow along, plus get other people to join us in the watching experience. It makes it a much more communal activity that helps us connect with others.
Why not throw in 15-minutes or 30-minutes of adds in certain part as well. To slow it down and allow the watchers to take to social media upon release.
I think this was very important for the success of Games of Thrones. If everybody could watch it at any time and at any rate, we would have had not only spoilers but there wouldn't have been all the chatters at the coffee machines the day after the show and no buildup of expectations for the next episode. Probably nothing changes for not great series.
Gross. Individuals are responsible for avoiding spoilers, not the community. Having a fixed time when episodes become available probably causes more spoilers anyway, once that time passes it’s open season.
Plus that’s how disappointment and resentment are formed. You wait a week to watch the episode and then they kill off all the WW in a single episode, makes the years of build up feel like shit. If I could binge the season from the start I might not have stopped watching it because you are not sitting there almost expecting a letdown for the next week.
That's your choice, which is 100% irrellevant to those who prefer to bulk-view.
You can freely stop watching after one episode and return next week if you want. Your preference holds zero bearing on whether you can still do what you want, so you should fairly and similarly do nothing to interfere with others getting their way too, regardless of your choice being different.
Rather, unless you want your options constrained by others, do not support, encourage, or permit the constraint of others' options, then deign to imagine that your preference matters one iota to them.
You’re not alone. I’ve spent more time talking about _Better Call Saul_ and _She-Hulk_ in the last week thank I have about _Stranger Things_ during the entirety of its run. Zeitgeist conversation is both enjoyable for many consumers and free marketing for streamers.
My thinking is that it will circle around to that. Meaning one or two streaming providers will remain and all content will be published there and likely the producers and studios will make the same amount of money regardless. Might be even more given no overheads of technology build and maintenance costs.
I find this entire idea absolutely hilarious. That anyone thinks they would've been able to watch everything on TV they wanted for $15 a month or less when the cable industry was charging well over $100 a month prior. Anyone who believed this would be the case is... well, HN rules would rather I not be that blunt.
Netflix briefly enjoyed this width of content solely because it was viewed as an additional revenue stream and not the primary one. As soon as streaming became the default, it was necessary to actually bring in enough money to make multi-million dollar episodes, and that means not selling content to Netflix for pennies on the dollar. Netflix wisely used the interim to build it's own first party content library (which everyone else already had), while everyone else had to build the distribution network (which Netflix already had). While they did it in a different order, they ended up placed about even with other TV companies in the long run.
The cable industry admittedly also included sports and some other live content--some of which is on various streaming services. And some other content is only available a la carte. But I agree with your basic point.
A hypothetical all non-live available digital content for one monthly price would probably be over $200/month.
The good news for someone like myself is that I can get tons of content (and access to more a la carte) for under $50/month. I could add a live streaming service and I'd still be paying less than my cable TV bill used to be.
There are definitely some efficiencies... and inefficiencies of the new model. Used to get 200 channels for $100, and now I can get like 6-8 streaming services for that. But since it's a la carte I can pick which ones I use, including spinning down to only one or two.
The sports surcharge model I'm especially glad to get rid of. During the pandemic, the Chicago Cubs decided to launch Marquee Sports Network, and require every carrier in the Chicago area to subscribe all customers to it for roughly $7 a month... or not be able to carry it at all. The ridiculousness of it is like if you were forced to buy HBO by your Internet provider.
IMHO, the city of Chicago should've kicked the Cubs out of the city over it, but sports teams have too much power over municipalities.
(Note that the carriers are presumably contractually required to deny you are being forcibly subscribed, but every carrier's sports fees uniformly went up approximately $7 a month when Marquee launched.)
Downloading content from torrents will persist until the torrent service operators will continue to provide a better service. Better service includes no regional restrictions and more complete content catalog.
The first season for free for many network shows has been going on for years and years. They're trying to get you hooked and then pay for the production X upgrade (Starz, SHOWtime... etc.)
I am actually still totally blown away I can't watch at minimum the first episode of every TV show on any given app or streaming service for free. The format absolutely begs to use the early episodes to hook viewers so that you can charge them to continue/finish the show.
I'm a big Vudu user, which used to have a much wider variety of temporary deals for first episodes for free, but any time I look at a show and see the first episode is $1.99, I'm just... confused, like the folks making those decisions missed Marketing 101.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
One of the promises of the web was that archives could live on forever.
What we're seeing is a strong reaction to that promise being broken. It's not about whether you're in the audience or even if you have young kids (or may some day) who might want to watch the archives, it's that the vision of the great comprehensive virtual library is dead.
There's nothing you can do about this except start building private collections again. If you want to make sure you can still have access to something in 35 years, buy it in either a physical medium or a digital medium you can download without DRM.
And, to be honest, whenever I've given into the temptation to buy a DVD collection of some favorite old TV series, I usually watch a few episodes for nostalgia purposes and then it gathers dust.
