Sesame Street Has a Pulse on Pop Culture

"Sesame Street" is made for kids, but darn it, it's a pretty good show no matter how old you are. The program, which has been on the air for decades, isn't just educational — it's also very funny.
Want an example? A buzzy clip of Grover lampooning the hugely popular Old Spice commercials is stirring up the Search box. In just a few days, the video, which aims to teach kids about the word "on," has racked up close to a million views on YouTube. Search queries on "grover old spice" have jumped over 1,000%. Check it out for yourself below and learn to "smell like a monster..."



In the 40 years since it was founded, Sesame Street has been the single largest informal educator of children—not just in the US, but around the world. Sesame Workshop creates locally produced media to help children develop their prospects while striving to bridge educational, socioeconomic and cultural gaps.
Sesame Workshop is continually pushing the limits of the digital experience, which would explain why it won this year’s New Approaches—Daytime Entertainment Emmy, an award that recognizes the use of new media (associated websites, webcasts, and interactivity).

The Workshop produces content for multiple media platforms on a wide range of issues, including literacy, health, and military deployment. Initiatives meet specific needs to help young children and their families develop critical skills, acquire healthy habits and build emotional strength to prepare them for lifelong learning.

“Sesame Workshop creates games in an effort to leverage our educational content and provide rich opportunities for children to interact with the Sesame Street characters across various platforms: online, game consoles, and mobile devices,” says Makeda Mays Green, Director of Education and Research, Digital Media, at Sesame Workshop.

YouTube is Offering Video Editing Tool

Google's video site plans to release an editing tool aimed at those who know little about editing videos. The tool will have editing features that allow people to trim videos and remove background noise, replacing the hum or buzz with music. That's for starters.
The free YouTube Video Editor tool will not require people to download complex software. The tool becomes perfect for those who take a quick video, find the first five seconds jumbled up, and want to trim it off quickly.
Video Editor will use the Audio Swap library of tracks, so people can add them for free. Replacing the background noise with music will allow people to choose from a library of tunes that YouTube made available for free, too.
The ability to splice and remove a piece of the video and move it to another location in the clip is not available now, but YouTube Product Manager Josh Siegel, and Google and YouTube engineer Rushabh Doshi explain that could come in time based on member feedback. As a workaround, people can drag the same video twice into the timeline -- trimming the beginning of one and the end of another and slicing them together.
Although YouTube will target the tool at a segment of consumers that may not have heard or thought about video editing before, the tools will allow them to edit and render 1080p, which is full high definition. "The tool is based in the cloud and it's totally in line with Google's cloud computing strategy," Siegel says. "We're pushing it out as a bare-bones video editor, and as we improve the product in time based on user feedback, we can push out the new features in real time without requiring anyone to download them."
Marketers and advertisers have a heavy product department, but once they upload it to YouTube they might find portions don't fit the experience they want to capture, so they can trim them in the editor.
It's not clear whether YouTube will build different versions of the tool if the company decides to expand on the services. It's a product, marketing and engineering discussion that will require careful consideration, Siegel and Doshi agree.