Crave’s streaming platform secures rights for recent ‘Sesame Street’ episodes

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This article was published 12/04/2022 (1583 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO – Sunny days are headed to Crave, the new Canadian home of “Sesame Street” on streaming.

The Bell Media-owned service says it has signed an agreement with Sesame Workshop to bring episodes of the educational children’s television series to the streaming platform starting Friday.

It’s the first time recent episodes of “Sesame Street” have been available to stream in Canada, though for those who closely watch the series, these aren’t entirely new.

On Friday, Crave will roll out all 35 episodes from season 51, which debuted on the U.S. streaming platform HBO Max in late 2020 and on TV through the Public Broadcasting Service last year.

In September, Crave says it will expand the selection with the 35 episodes from season 52, which is now rolling out weekly on HBO Max south of the border. The latest season grabbed attention for introducing Ji-Young, the first Asian-American muppet in the show’s canon.

As part of the deal, a host of other “Sesame Street” specials will appear on Crave in the coming months, while “Mecha Builders,” an upcoming CGI-animated spinoff series, is set to premiere in the fall.

The Canadian streaming deal is the latest development in a complicated recent history for “Sesame Street,” a groundbreaking series that was once considered a flagship of PBS, the publicly funded U.S. broadcaster.

In 2015, U.S. pay TV channel HBO took first-run rights for new episodes of the show, leaving PBS to air those episodes in a second-run window several months later.

Then “Sesame Street” moved from the HBO channel to HBO Max in 2019 as its owner WarnerMedia looked to expand its family programming as streaming competition heated up.

In Canada, the series was harder to find, with most viewers catching recent episodes when they made their way to PBS.

The “Sesame Street” lineup on Crave will also feature a “classics” section of 20 memorable past episodes with celebrity guests including Robin Williams, Feist, James Earl Jones and Ryan Reynolds.

A representative for Bell Media said Tuesday the collection will not include the historic Buffy Sainte-Marie episode that showed the Cree singer-songwriter breastfeeding her child. Sainte-Marie became a regular on the series for six years, playing a character known around the neighbourhood as Buffy.

Crave has a robust and long-standing partnership with WarnerMedia for an array of its TV and film programming, including classic sitcom “Friends;” HBO Max originals such as “Julia,” a dramatic series on the life of Julia Child; and recent Hollywood hits that include “The Batman,” set to premiere Monday.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 12, 2022.