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Minor note but Sesame Street should be fine since it’s not actually owned by HBO. It’s owned by an independent nonprofit (Sesame Workshop) which currently has a distribution deal with HBO, but episodes are also still available on PBS (both broadcast and streaming).

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Hope so. Fuck with Sesame Street and you're gonna wish for the comforting embrace of the Wrath of God compared to what will come your way.

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Your regular format is a 5 course meal, and this is a nice steak and salad, I love a nice steak and salad, so more of this when called for. Big yep on the streaming thing, being one of the few winners was gonna be equivalent to being ABC/NBC/CBS, so it made sense to go all in, but at some point its gotta pay off, and it looks like some point is now. I wonder how long the Tubis and Plutos can hang on.

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Watch for streaming based reality shows. One big sign that the networks were dying was the rise of "unscripted" reality shows.

I remember reading an article in Fortune on television from back in 1939. (It was an old issue. I'm not THAT old.) It pointed out that television shows cost a whole lot more than radio shows to produce, and the authors wondered how anyone would be able to afford it. BBC was broadcasting television then, but obviously with government subsidies.

After World War II, television took off, but most markets had only three channels. Shows were supported by single sponsors, and there were a lot of variety shows, game shows and talk shows. By the late 1950s, though, there was plenty of advertising money and still only a handful of channels to advertise on, so there was a golden age of television or, as they called it back then, the vast wasteland.

UHF didn't change things. Cable changed things, but only a little. It enabled a small number of higher quality channels like HBO and a lot of cheap garbage channels like the Quality Shopping Network with a fair number in between. The money was from advertising and cable fees.

Streaming brings us back to the revenue problem. You can't charge all that much for streaming. You can only do so much advertising. Unlike cable where one buys a whole bunch of channels, streaming buys you what seems to be one channel except that you can program what's on. No wonder all the streamers are talking about running advertising.

I was just too young for Howdy Doody, but I've been following television since way when. I even bought a tuner and small antenna for my Mac. Wow, are there a lot of reruns. I've already seen the Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. It's more interesting watching the media evolve.

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This is a great point, and/but now I'm going to have lines from Weird Al Yankovic's 1989 movie "UHF" running through my head all day.

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I’d never heard of Garry Tan either and while I’m certainly no fan of tech bros rule the world, it’s not something I write about directly as a rule. Plus I’m not very important on Twitter. But he blocked me, too. I’m gonna assume someone wrote an algorithm that blocked people based on their profiles and/or people they follow that he doesn’t like.

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Free marketplace of ideas, baby!

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