To make changes to your membership and billing, please click here for more information.

I can’t find my favorite PBS show in PBS Passport. Why not?

While PBS is pleased to offer online streaming for many popular programs, you may have noticed that some shows and episodes cannot be found on the PBS website and PBS app.

Unfortunately, PBS is not always able to obtain the streaming rights for every program which has aired on PBS, which means we are legally unable to offer full episodes for online streaming at this time. This can include entire shows, specific seasons, or specific episodes of a program.

Any program or piece of television on PBS is a piece of intellectual property (just like a song or a book). With any piece of intellectual property come certain rights and allowances for the creators, distributors, and consumers. Many of these rights include online video viewing stipulations. If a program is not available for viewing on pbs.org, it is because of the specific intellectual property rights associated with that show, and often, these rights vary from show to show.

We must purchase streaming rights separately from television broadcast rights and we are not always able to obtain the streaming rights for every program, so our online content may be more limited than programs airing on your television.

While Passport does allow us to offer more content for online streaming, we are unable to offer every program for online streaming indefinitely due to the aforementioned streaming rights.

For some programs we do offer clips and previews as these are not as restricted as the full episodes and may be of interest to some users.

While these episodes may be unavailable for free online streaming, we recommend visiting the PBS Store or a third party such as iTunes or Amazon Video if you are interested in purchasing episodes of these programs.