Sesame Workshop



Sesame Workshop is the owner and sole proprietor of Sesame Street as well as television properties Dragon Tales, Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, Square One TV and Big Bag.

Sesame workshop was founded as the Children's Television Workshop in 1968 by Joan Ganz Cooney and several partners as a non-profit organization for the education of children. One of the first shows from that company was Sesame Street, which proved to be successful. The Ford Foundation was their initial sponsor, along with government grants.

In 1999, the Children's Televison Workshop, along with Nickelodeon, a division of MTV Networks and owned by Viacom, launched a kids' channel called Noggin, featuring many classic kids' shows from both companies. CTW sold its half of the channel to Viacom in 2002.

In 2000, the Children's Television Workshop changed its name to Sesame Workshop because by then the company had expanded beyond television. Due to this, Sesame Workshop began to eliminate all references to CTW, such as cutting out the references in Sesame Street's closing credits and replacing all the old CTW logos on TV with the current Sesame Workshop animated logo. In December of the same year, The Jim Henson Company (then under ownership of the German EM.TV) sold the rights to the Sesame Street Muppets for $180 million, giving Sesame Workshop full ownership of Sesame Street Muppets.

In 2005, Sesame Workshop, along with Comcast, PBS, and HIT Entertainment, launched a new cable channel called PBS Kids Sprout.

The organization runs a critically acclaimed website, sesameworkshop.org. In late 2007, they launched the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "to catalyze and support research, innovation and investment in digital media technologies to advance children's learning."