Voiding your bowels isn’t planned revenge, it’s simply a fact. 
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But… but… if a new letter is added to the alphabet, these rich kids will know way before those whose family cannot afford HBO!
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Really, y’all can’t imagine how moving to a for-profit network might change Sesame Street? How does privatizing public services usually work out?
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They aren’t moving, they are just show the episodes earlier. As far as I know, the company producing the shows is still a non-profit company. I would argue that this is a different situation than privatizing public services.
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Well, I think that you may be misreading what many here are saying, which is essentially:
It sucks that CPB is in this predicament. It never should have come to this.
and
Thank you HBO for stepping up and being a responsible corporate citizen (although I’m sure they didn’t just decide to do this on a whim, I’m sure there were some “will this increase our subscription base” calculations thrown in there).
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False equivalency! Thanks for playing.
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How so? HBO is a pay cable channel, last time I checked? How do you manage to get it for free?
The real problem with the “Worth more to X means worth less to non-X” formulation is that it confuses the value to the exhibitor with the value to the viewer. The exclusivity window increases the value to HBO, but not only does it not decrease the value of the new episodes for non-HBO viewers, it also adds the value of continuing production of new episodes for all viewers.
In addition to that obvious problem, it also misses a major piece of what ‘value to the exhibitor’ might mean.
The exclusivity deal allows HBO to gloss the transaction as a pay-for-benefit business deal, so they can keep Sesame Street alive without arousing the ire of conservative Time-Warner shareholders, who could otherwise sue for ‘failing to maximize shareholder value’ if HBO simply gave that same amount of money to CTW with no strings attached.
The deal actually makes very little sense as a profit-maker: the small marginal increase in HBO revenue resulting from people willing to pay for HBO so as to get new Sesame Street episodes nine months early can’t possibly justify this price.
The exclusivity deal is, IMnvHO, a fig leaf to protect HBO’s act of good corporate citizenship from cranky stockholders who don’t want their money wasted on edumacatin’ the poors.
But people who are high on outrage rarely notice complexities like this.
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Once we get beyond CD’s hyperbolic “The world is coming to an end” realize that Sesame Street costs money to make. Your local PBS affiliate has to pay a licencing fee to broadcast the Sesame Street every day. Now that HBO is paying for the right to have the first broadcast on it, it means that CTW doesn’t have to charge the PBS affiliates as much (or anything at all) to broadcast the shows once the 9 month window expires. While very few episodes are time sensitive (world events focus, Death of Mr. Hooper, etc.) those are very rare and won’t mean as much to the prime audience of the show. The shows are designed to be timeless so that you could watch the episodes in whatever order you feel like (though probably within a few years of each other).
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This is a non-issue. Or, rather, it’s a misplaced issue. The real beef should be that we, as a culture, just don’t give a shit about quality programming. That’s why the mind-numbingly awful Dora the Explorer does so well, for example. If people voted for leaders that gave a shit, creating a government that invested in culture and education because that’s what we, the people, wanted, it’d be a different story. But we don’t, so Sesame does what it has to do to survive, as it’s always done. Who do you think has been funding the show all these years? Rich people, duh.
Sesame Street barely got any money from PBS ever, and they’ve been hurting for a while now. Throwing HBO a 9-month bone is really nothing; it’s not symbolic of gated communities or any such shit. As so many people already mentioned, kids don’t give a shit, I don’t give a shit, no one gives a shit. Hell, I still haven’t gotten around to seeing the Wire, but when I do, it’ll be just as good.
The have / have-nots issue is alive and well pretty much everywhere else BUT Sesame Street. Yes, HBO is doing this to widen their family audience (they don’t really have any) because they have a whole new content-viewing system in the works and they need kid-friendly content. But so what? They could have demanded Sesame drop PBS altogether and they didn’t- that in itself is worth noting.
All in all, it means Sesame will actually have a budget for once in their lives, and not depend so much on endowment money and fundraising galas to stay afloat… which, again, all came from rich people anyway.
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Man, seeing so many people chuck around fallacy terms they don’t understand makes me want to explain it to them with puppets and catchy songs. Maybe in 9 months.
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It is a false equivalency to say that “seeing Sesame Street nine months later [because you don’t have HBO]” is the same as “poor kids get a different education than rich kids.”
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9 months later because you don’t have HBO is literally “different.”
Argument from fallacy! Thanks for playing.
So much for talking about the latest big bird antics over milk and cookies during morning snack. Time to teach kindergarteners about spoilers.
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Don’t you understand, the point of learning about logical fallacies is to throw their names out so that you don’t have to think about what other people are saying. Only suckers learn about fallacies so that they can improve their own thinking.
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Yeah, it doesn’t matter at all. Look, the poor kids water fountain gives out the exact same water as the rich kids water fountain. What’s the problem?
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Having HBO or not has literally nothing to do with poverty. Poor kids having a different education than than rich is a completely separate issue.
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On Thursday, people used Twitter to brainstorm about how the two brands
could work together even more closely. One suggestion was to cast Bert
and Ernie as the stars of the next season of “True Detective,” HBO’s
dark crime drama.
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