"The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and television program distributor. It is a nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educational television programming to public television stations in the United States..." (emphasis mine)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS

But the last two words in your quote are "United States."

PBS, like all distributors, licenses content from producers of content--sometimes PBS is the producer, often it is not--for distribution inside a defined territory.

For example, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Downton Abbey, and Are You Being Served are all British TV shows licensed by PBS for distribution in the US. PBS can't stream them worldwide same as the BBC can't show some of the content it distributes outside of the United Kingdom.

I can't stream BBC 1 in the US either though.

I thought you could if you have an account and accept the terms (including claiming to have a television licence, which I think requires a (British) national insurance number to obtain)?

Or do you mean as an American in the US?

Perhaps it's changed, but last time I looked the BBC had simple GeoIP blocking for anyone not inside the UK.

Not simple - they have an extensive blacklist of VPN servers too.

this provides an incentive for someone to provide vpn/tunneling service with IP pool large enough to prevent blacklisting to be effective

That doesn't last long.

The BBC use the same provider as a number of Vegas gambling services, and they're very effective because Vegas is willing to spend lots of money on forensic work.

You cannot do this even as a Brit in the US. Everything on the iPlayer (except radio) is geo-restricted to the UK, and they're really very good at playing whack-a-mole with the VPN services as well.

They still buy syndicated content and have licenses for distributing things like BBC.

Like others have pointed out they're still licensing from content creators to broadcast in the US.

This is why new Sesame Street episodes are now on HBO and not PBS

It's a reasonable expectation for original content that they produce themselves. The problems start when you enter into byzantine licensing agreements with third party producers that insist on all sorts of complex agreements that are only valid within certain regions. It gets worse when those producers start delegating to even more subcontractors.

It's kind of backwards to be doing business this way. There are plenty of Youtube channels that have a wider reach than many TV shows with millions of subscribers and views per video. The trick is simply to ensure you have copyright for all content that you create plus a world wide distribution license for any third party content embedded in that (e.g. background music). This is basically how Netflix works these days and one of the reasons they are mopping up the media market that is still focused on creating and selling content for individual TV channels.

> This is basically how Netflix works these days

It absolutely isn't.

Basically, most Netflix productions launch on the same day in most/all countries they operate in. So it is absolutely their strategy to do this.