'Sesame Street' begins its first HBO season on January 16th, 2016

'Sesame Street' begins its first HBO season on January 16th, 2016

You won't have too much longer to wait to see how HBO handles Sesame Street. The network says it's launching the 46th season of the kids' show on January 16th, 2016 at 9AM (Eastern and Pacific). You'll have streaming access to five years' worth of episodes on both HBO Go and HBO Now, too. Just be prepared for a different experience than you remember from your childhood. Sesame Street pisodes will run 30 minutes instead of a full hour (ostensibly to help kids "focus"), and there are "updates" to both the show's iconic opening as well as the homes of its best-known characters.

As a refresher, PBS still gets to air new seasons -- it just has to wait nine months after HBO's turn (in other words, until the fall). Like it or not, the delay and the format changes are the prices the public broadcaster has to pay for an arrangement that helps keep Sesame Street afloat. The upshot is that it gives HBO a big helping of children's content, which it didn't really have before.