Ratings for Sesame Street?

[YellowYahooey]

I'd like to ask, how is Sesame Street doing in terms of ratings these days? I am thinking the show was more popular among people who are now in their 40s and 50s, but I did read somewhere that the show lost viewership in the early 2000s. In the late-1990s or 2000, the show's episode count was cut in half from 130 per season to 65. Then in 2002, it was cut further to 50, and then in 2003 it was cut to 26 - which is one episode for every letter of the alphabet. And in later years, some of those episodes would be reruns but with different segments.

About five years ago, the show was cut from 60 minutes to just 30, and when the show was picked up by HBO, the episode count was increased to 35, airing a new episode every weekend, but retaining the half-hour format to this day. If these 35 half-hour episodes per season were merged into hour-long episodes, the show's episode count would be roughly 18 episodes.

It implies that if not for the HBO deal, the show probably would have been cancelled by now. Even now, there are reruns still being shown, as per Muppet Wiki. This sounds like the show is in dire straits right now, and I don't know if the milestone 50th season may end up being the last. And I don't know if the upcoming Sesame Street movie is going to do well, but I think that may be a desperate attempt to recover revenue losses from past seasons.

So, I'd like to ask, how is the show doing in the ratings nowadays?

 

[Pig'sSaysAdios]

The show's ratings have gone down due to competition over the years, but that doesn't mean they get bad numbers. The smaller number of episodes has to do with budget cuts, rather than viewership. And yes, Sesame Workshop has stated that HBO did save them from death, as PBS couldn't pay them anymore.

 

[Any Del]

Sesame Workshop could earn about billions of dollars within days if they'd released Seasonal DVD?Blu-Ray boxsets.

 

[Oscarfan]

Sesame Workshop could earn about billions of dollars within days if they'd released Seasonal DVD?Blu-Ray boxsets.

Season boxsets of the show would be completely impractical; you could fit at most 3 hours on a disc, and that would still be 40+ discs a season.

Plus, there's tons of royalties/rights for the all the cast, celebrities, animators, filmmakers, musicians, etc - there's no way something like this would turn a profit.

Not to mention how much stuff was repeated on the show, you'd get sick of stuff pretty quickly (like "Doll House" is on five/fifteen episodes released on the Old School sets).

 

[Any Del]

Season boxsets of the show would be completely impractical; you could fit at most 3 hours on a disc, and that would still be 40+ discs a season.

Plus, there's tons of royalties/rights for the all the cast, celebrities, animators, filmmakers, musicians, etc - there's no way something like this would turn a profit.

Not to mention how much stuff was repeated on the show, you'd get sick of stuff pretty quickly (like "Doll House" is on five/fifteen episodes released on the Old School sets).

Wow... I wan't living in reality. Fair point right there. Thanks for that.

 

[YellowYahooey]

Considering many of the season premieres up to and including Season 15 were included among the Old School DVDs, and many season premieres did have the number 2 as sponsors, it's no wonder "Doll House" was featured in many of the episodes throughout the Old School DVDs.

 

[YellowYahooey]

Plus, there's tons of royalties/rights for the all the cast, celebrities, animators, filmmakers, musicians, etc - there's no way something like this would turn a profit..

It seems as if the Old School DVD sets didn't sell well, so they decided to not do any further releases of episodes.

Though they have released classic Muppet segments on various DVDs over the years, without having to pay royalties.