Last week, Netflix ended its licensing deal with Viacom, thereby losing popular Nick Jr. kids’ shows like Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants and Blue’s Clues. This pretty much ruined the weekend for a bunch of parents and their streaming-loving kids, judging by the comments on our site.
Among the comments on our original post (39 and counting):
At least two separate birthday parties were ruined:
The laments have continued on Reddit, where some tech-savvy parents are looking to pirate the shows:
As my colleague Janko Roettgers pointed out last week, it’s still possible that Netflix could license individual shows from Viacom. And Netflix noted that it’s recently added new shows from Disney and the Cartoon Network. In the meantime, Netflix’s loss could once again be Amazon’s gain, as numerous commenters pointed out that Amazon Prime has the missing Viacom shows. In fact, Dora, SpongeBob, Yo Gabba Gabba and Blue’s Clues are among the top-10 most-popular shows streaming on Prime today.
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