Which U.S. network aired Sesame Street's original 1969 run before PBS?

National Educational Television aired Sesame Street’s original 1969 run before PBS. The program premiered on November 10, 1969, through the NET network, which was then the United States’ educational television system.

NET was succeeded by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1970. That transition is why PBS is closely associated with Sesame Street’s long broadcast history, even though PBS was not the network that carried the show at its initial launch.

Sesame Street was created by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett and produced by the Children’s Television Workshop, now known as Sesame Workshop. Its groundbreaking format combined puppetry, animation, live action, music, and research-based lessons in letters, numbers, vocabulary, and social skills.

A common mix-up is answering PBS because most viewers remember Sesame Street as a PBS program. PBS did become its enduring public-television home, but National Educational Television is the historically precise answer for the 1969 debut.