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American Archive of Public Broadcasting to receive all Sesame Street episodes

S

ssetta

It turns out, that for Sesame Street's 50th anniversary, they are donating every single episode to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) to be available for public viewing at the Library of Congress, and the WGBH Media library. I'm actually in the Boston area, so I consider myself very lucky. Can you believe they chose Boston, out of the whole country? Anyway, this is the happiest I've ever been in years, because as some of you know, I am a huge die-hard Sesame Street fan, they have made over 4,500 episodes, and for the longest time, they did not let anyone view them, they would not send out tapes, and they never had reruns. I feel like this is a dream come true. If you don't believe me, read this:

https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-19-019/
 
This is fantastic news, a huge part of the history of PBS (and NET) being put in permanent archive. And it will be completely digitized, which is awesome. Hopefully the AAPB will do the same with Electric Company, Mister Rogers and some of the other PBS educational shows, if they haven't already, in the near-future. Definitely something to have in permanent archive, as the earlier episodes were so much better, albeit some of the skits may not fly as well with today's youth as it would with a 4-year-old growing up in 1971.
 
No they’re not going to be available for viewing online, as far as I know. As for Mister Rogers, I’m pretty sure they have every episode at the University of Pittsburgh (or some University in Pittsburgh).
 
onairb2014 said:
Will it include the Margaret Hamilton/Wicked Witch episode(which aired once, but was never repeated)?
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There actually have been a lot of questions about that. It seems to be a very highly-demanded episode lately. But you have to remember, that all other episodes only ever aired twice, once in first-run, and then once in summer reruns. As for the Wicked Witch episode, I don’t know if they’ll have it, but from what I understand, they will eventually get every episode.
 
Well, I know that I am the only one who ever posted in this thread, because I was practically the only one who cared about it. But I am sadly bumping it up for a reason. It looks like they have decided to halt this project after all. All episodes have been removed from the AAPB, and are now only available for viewing at the Library of Congress. Here's why:


I am like completely devastated by this. When I first heard about this, I felt like it was the best thing that ever happened. And now, it's gone. I don't think we'll ever get to see every Sesame Street episode ever made. This may sound like a stupid question: Are there any true Classic Sesame Street fans on there?
 
I would very much enjoy watching a few older episodes if they were ever available. Especially late 70s/early 80s, which would be my "prime" age of watching. Mr Hooper dying was a big event, followed by the adults finally seeing Snuffleupagas. I was past normal Sesame Street age by then (I was 12), but sat with my younger sister to see that Snuffleupagas episode multiple times as I was so glad to see that change. I do think it is an untapped market. Kind of like the soap operas that never even had reruns, so most of those episodes only aired once (except for when the Soap Opera network was active). There's lots of people that would enjoy seeing older episodes of those kinds of daily shows.

Side note on the airing episodes comment, my local PBS would air Sesame Street once in the morning, then repeat it in the afternoon, and also aired repeats on Sunday morning, so episodes in our market definitely aired more than twice.
 
The last time old Sesame Street episodes aired was on Noggin years ago. But is there a niche market for old fans of the show? Especially since some of the segments they had in the 1970s and 1980s may not appeal to the children of the early 2020s. They want Elmo - and lots of it.
And just like soap operas, yes, there should be some type of streaming channel for old soaps ala the old SoapNet. They may have dropped in popularity because more women are working and are not interested in soaps, but Y&R especially still appeals to women audiences. It's been the #1 soap for 30+ years now.
 
Well they do have a good amount of old Sesame Street episodes on HBO Max, many of which had not been seen by the public in decades, including the ones mentioned above.
 
Sesame Street has 3 Best of sets on DVD "Sesame Street Old School Volumes 1, 2, & 3" covering select full episodes including the unaired pilot with a segment with James Earl Jones and various clips from 1969 to 1985 and no Elmo.
 
Most AAPB users understand this, and comply with our terms and conditions. However, recently, a user improperly downloaded episodes of Sesame Street that were restricted to AAPB premises. The restriction was based on both our agreement with the creators of Sesame Street and copyright law. AAPB have arranged for takedown of these episodes from the Internet Archive and YouTube, and has tightened security. For now, we have been forced to remove any AAPB access to Sesame Street. The archive will still be available on premises at the Library of Congress Moving Image Research Center to all registered user
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Wait. Presumably, then, some person physically visiting the AAPB facility smuggled in a thumbdrive, copied files to it from the archive's internal LAN then walked out with it? Because that's what "downloaded episodes that were restricted to our premises" implies (depending how loosely you want to interpret the word "download"). So now because their own internal policing and accountability have failed, they're punishing the whole world for it because misery loves company. Brilliant, stereotypically American strategy. :rolleyes:

How much more is there to the story that's not being reported? This isn't like, say, Social Security data or medical records of half the population being leaked. It's a few old episodes of bloody "Sesame Street" that probably hadn't seen the light of day since the Carter administration.
 
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Okay, Reagan administration then.
 
The user never visited the premises. They found a way to sort of "hack" into it even without visiting. It's a long story, I probably shouldn't get into it too much, even though I want to, but they used this plugin to do it. The problem is, their system was not terribly secure. And then once enough people found out about this trick, that's when this all happened. That's all I'm getting into.
 
Then why did they put them on the public Internet in the first place if they were so worried about people getting access to them? If you don't want information getting out to the world, don't put it out there. Major no-brainer. Basic information theory: if you can see it you can copy and save it. To deny it is to deny reality. The AAPB's so-called "few 'irresponsible' Sesame Street fans" are the AAPB themselves for not understanding this inconvenient truth, not their users.

And if they didn't want people downloading them they shouldn't have even thought of submitting them to Internet Archive or Youtube. The thing is, if you view something on Internet Archive or Youtube then it's being downloaded to your disk whether one realises/understands it or not. It doesn't take a computer scientist or an evil, sinister "hacker" to open an HTML page in a text editor and search it for an MP4 (or what have you) link*, then do "save link as" -- which is all being done automatically in the background by your browser anyways. Archive's various web players/emulators function by buffering media files to your terminal's disk or RAM and chase-playing them from your local buffer. It doesn't actually play the file directly from their server. Youtube's player works the same way. Even on "stream only" items on Archive there's usually an M3U playlist file with soft links directly to the media files, hidden in plain sight. That's not a "security" oversight - that was by design, to facilitate its use with external players like VLC. Pop that file open in your favourite text editor and you've a list of downloadable URLs to all your undownloadable files. I mean, duh. Youtube download tools; well, gee, those have existed for years, some work better than others.

[ * It's actually much more complicated with Youtube but there are many, many sites that access in exactly that manner. ]

And the "plugin": probably a widely-used command shell programme called youtube-dl which, despite its name, supports hundreds of sites. It used to work great but the author has gone MIA and it's fallen into disrepair. Youtube-dl is one of the tools I used in at least some of my aircheck preservation work (because we all know how Youtube are these days, don't we?). The fork yt-dlp picks up where it left off. I haven't used dlp (yet, my version of Python is too outdated and awaiting upgrade) but apparently it fixes a lot of problems "classic" youtube-dl has developed vs. updated site infrastructures and adds many features.

But one doesn't even need to do that: if one is dumb enough to still have disk caching enabled in their browser in 2021, then one only need go to about:cache and it'll be listed in there along with the contents of every other Web page you've accessed since the beginning of time. IIRC the file is called "videoplayer" or "videoplayback", but I may be wrong since it's been many years (meaning: well over a decade) since I've had to do it that way.
 
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ssetta said:
There actually have been a lot of questions about that. It seems to be a very highly-demanded episode lately. But you have to remember, that all other episodes only ever aired twice, once in first-run, and then once in summer reruns. As for the Wicked Witch episode, I don’t know if they’ll have it, but from what I understand, they will eventually get every episode.
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I lived in NYC from 71-79 and Sesame Street had aired 5 times daily all new (no reruns Weekdays) on WNET-13, WLIW-21 and WNYC-31 all PBS Stations
 
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