Over 100 PBS local stations start streaming on YouTube TV
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Pluto.tv: replicate the cable guide experience. Endless episodes of things like This Old House, MST3k, and vintage game shows. I much prefer Pluto content to modern HGTV-type cable shows, and it scratches the same itch of "just watch whatever's on".
Kanopy: use your library card or university ID to stream indie movies and documentaries. Free kids programming. Lots of PBS.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-strea...
The commercials aren't great. I wish I could pay to have it cut to the (cool!) Pluto.tv splash screens rather than see ads.
https://kotaku.com/how-elmo-ruined-sesame-street-1746504585
Major thesis: "It started in small ways. A lot of stories used to be based around Big Bird, who was psychologically characterized as a six-year-old. And in a lot of ways, this was ideal—six years old was on the older end of Sesame Street’s age demographic, and Big Bird served as both a role model and a peer to his audience. Big Bird’s comparative maturity also meant that he could project a wide range of emotions—he was ‘old enough’ to understand mature concepts, such as the permanence of Mr. Hooper’s death."
"Elmo stories, on the other hand, tend to affirm and celebrate the child’s perspective. Rarely, if ever, is Elmo’s innocence challenged, or is he forced to think about someone’s happiness other than his own. He spends most of his time hanging out with Zoe, Abby, Telly, and Baby Bear—Muppets who share his emotional maturity, and unlike Grover, Kermit, and Ernie, do nothing to push him. In fact, he is the de facto leader of his group—the dialogue lowers to Elmo’s level, rather than rising to an older character’s. And while this is cute and fun, it gets old fast, and it doesn’t really go anywhere. Elmo is learning about counting to four and different shapes, but he’s not learning a whole lot of life lessons."
I don’t have kids of my own yet, so I’m out of touch with how the show is being run these days, but if Elmo is the lead now, this definitely sounds like a step back in quality level.
I guess it makes sense from a business perspective for the creators. I’m sure it helps the bottom line. Kids go nuts for Elmo.
Regardless, it makes me happy to see PBS expand their reach. The quality level across the board is astounding! If it was the only network I had access to I would be happy.
Nova science is unreal! ‘Nature’ episodes are best in the business for nature docs. Many of the Masterpiece series are great... and don’t sleep on all the cooking shows. For a publicly funded organization, it’s absolutely mind blowing the quality of product they put out.
A real treasure.
My (at the time 2 year old) referred to Seasame Street as "Elmo."
The shift in content aligns with the shift that has happened in Early Learning Education in the US--mainly less emphasis in academic subjects, and more emphasis on social and emotional skills.
Modern Seasame Street broaches social topics, with a small amount of academics (mainly letter and number of the day).
That being said the count is still the count and Chappelle's skit [1] is still spot on.
Sesame Street is for pre-schoolers, which was never academic outside of a cadre of upper class dog-eat-dog New Yorkers
Can you explain what you mean by this?
There's a torrent of ancient Sesame Street episodes out there, I used to show them to my kid
Believe me, there's no shortage of counting on Sesame Street, so the fact they detour into guessing once or twice isn't a bad thing.
Then Elmo became highly bankable (Tickle Me Elmo) and they leaned hard on him. Elmo is... not as good for modeling behavior and interactions.
Obviously kids love it.
So... yeah, you nailed it.
With Norah Jones: https://youtu.be/FEzxchU4RUY
With Katy Perry: https://youtu.be/PwZnCkoX5gI
And my absolute favorite, better than the original, with the Goo Goo Dolls: https://youtu.be/uGohKgNOXnU
Edit... but... yes... the Elmo Numa Numa tops everything: https://youtu.be/2rAKszSX2tU (which btw, was indeed uploaded 11 years ago, but I think has an erroneous view count..)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sesame_Street_Muppets
Here's Johnny Cash on Sesame Street:
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is also a non-profit, funded solely by the federal government, but is independent from PBS and doesn't produce any programming.
My guess is they are trying to generate much-needed funds from toy sales, as well as compete for eyeballs with other more engaging children's programming ("bombardment" as Fred Rogers once called it).
The difference between Paw Patrol and Daniel Tiger is night and day.
For a reference essay on the shift from Big Bird to Elmo: https://kotaku.com/how-elmo-ruined-sesame-street-1746504585
Major thesis: "It started in small ways. A lot of stories used to be based around Big Bird, who was psychologically characterized as a six-year-old. And in a lot of ways, this was ideal—six years old was on the older end of Sesame Street’s age demographic, and Big Bird served as both a role model and a peer to his audience. Big Bird’s comparative maturity also meant that he could project a wide range of emotions—he was ‘old enough’ to understand mature concepts, such as the permanence of Mr. Hooper’s death."
"Elmo stories, on the other hand, tend to affirm and celebrate the child’s perspective. Rarely, if ever, is Elmo’s innocence challenged, or is he forced to think about someone’s happiness other than his own. He spends most of his time hanging out with Zoe, Abby, Telly, and Baby Bear—Muppets who share his emotional maturity, and unlike Grover, Kermit, and Ernie, do nothing to push him. In fact, he is the de facto leader of his group—the dialogue lowers to Elmo’s level, rather than rising to an older character’s. And while this is cute and fun, it gets old fast, and it doesn’t really go anywhere. Elmo is learning about counting to four and different shapes, but he’s not learning a whole lot of life lessons."
Not all but many episodes.
I particularly like SpaceTime, Eons, and Crash Course. There are many others, too.
They're more dry than the ones you mentioned, but pleasant to nod off to.
An interesting aspect of the project was that their catalog was fairly well normalized. I was expecting the usual mess of data structures.
It was built with vanilla Django. No rest framework because the feed was rendered to static files served by S3. During our discussions I brought using Go for its performance and resilience. That was (correctly) decided against and we went with Django. Why Django? It's easy to wrap up periodic jobs as commands and runnning them with django celery.
Worldwide distribution costs more than domestic, and streaming rights cost more than broadcast-only. And PBS doesn't have as much leverage as for-profit broadcasters, so the negotiations for those rights took longer.
Here's some prior context:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/04/15/w...
https://www.techhive.com/article/3338083/why-live-pbs-stream...
The answer is they'd have to pay stacks of people for streaming rights, on a tiny budget. I really pity the poor bastards at PBS who had to try and arrange the underlying copyright clearance for this YouTube deal, which must have been an unholy nightmare given their budget.
I'm an avid PBS Frontline viewer (some of the best documentaries out there). As a Canadian, I can watch most of them on the PBS website, but the odd time an episode will be rights restricted. I assume this is because of footage or music that they are unable to clear the licenses for outside of the US. And really, as a publicly funded broadcaster, why should they care about me in Canada?
I'm with you. But I think you'd run into the 1-2 combination of the American public not wanting to fund free TV for Canadians (though obviously the marginal cost is ~$0) and the Canadian public not wanting to "pollute" our air waves with American media.
Also possible, and something I hadn't thought of.
PBS, like all distributors, licenses content from producers of content--sometimes PBS is the producer, often it is not--for distribution inside a defined territory.
For example, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Downton Abbey, and Are You Being Served are all British TV shows licensed by PBS for distribution in the US. PBS can't stream them worldwide same as the BBC can't show some of the content it distributes outside of the United Kingdom.
Or do you mean as an American in the US?
The BBC use the same provider as a number of Vegas gambling services, and they're very effective because Vegas is willing to spend lots of money on forensic work.
This is why new Sesame Street episodes are now on HBO and not PBS
It's kind of backwards to be doing business this way. There are plenty of Youtube channels that have a wider reach than many TV shows with millions of subscribers and views per video. The trick is simply to ensure you have copyright for all content that you create plus a world wide distribution license for any third party content embedded in that (e.g. background music). This is basically how Netflix works these days and one of the reasons they are mopping up the media market that is still focused on creating and selling content for individual TV channels.
It absolutely isn't.
Thank God for WTTW 11.
- PBS Kids* : $4.99/month
- PBS Masterpiece* : $5.99/month
- PBS Living* : $2.99/month
$19/month for all of these, is still better than $50 for Youtube TV, if all you care about is PBS programming.
* Requires Amazon Prime
The announcement above seems to be an ad for youtube's $50 streaming service. Anyone who has that service already knows what it carries. Anyone wanting to sign up for that service based on PBS alone should just turn on their TV and see what happens.
It's useful though for Americans living out of the country.
(for disclosure, I work for a PBS station)
Aside from that, I love PBS.
For local cable operators I think there is a big opportunity though to develop their own apple tv apps to stream IPTV so that the remain relevant. I have pretty fast local internet and youtube tv for less than the bundled package. They are already streaming IPTV to small boxes connected to a TV so it seems like apple tv integration should be easy.
The stations are locally-owned. Usually by a college, school district, or local government entity.
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a local program on one
Almost all PBS stations have local programming, even in small markets. Some of them award-winning programs.
And a lot of the "national" shows are actually productions of local stations. For example, Masterpiece is WGBH/Boston (in partnership with other broadcasters). Sesame Street started out as WNET/Newark.
Some PBS stations do a good job of providing unique programming to small markets. For example, in the 90's WVIA/Scranton aired Star Trek reruns because they weren't available in that market.
[0] https://current.org/1979/02/the-nixon-administration-public-...
I suspect that you'll have a lot of stations streaming the same thing at different times.
As some others have commented, the local/national split works well for PBS and NPR. The model is similar to how local broadcast affiliates work (like your local ABC or CBS station) but is more mutually beneficial.
I can try to answer any specific questions you have, if you want.
Local PBS channels cover local content. It's the same reason local news isn't broadcast nationwide.
PBS itself does nationwide coverage of news along with creating other content, which is syndicated.
Edit: there are a number of other reasons as well, including the difficulty of coordinating national broadcasts at the time that PBS was founded. Major networks were once also primarily driven by local affiliates, with some differences in local programming. The US is a big place.
This exists[1], but it isn't PBS.
Propaganda isn't just Soviet posters describing the abundant harvest. Any widely broadcast messages with an explicit goal to influence populations, even if the messages are accurate, is propaganda.
The recasting of propaganda as "evil lies" (or "fake news") has poisoned the well when it comes to discussion of accurate propaganda, which still exists and is in use every day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
Not if you frame it like that, no.