“All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” the two soap operas that were canceled by ABC and then resurrected on the Internet, are returning to television, at least temporarily, through a deal with Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel OWN.
Episodes of the soaps will continue to be available on Hulu and iTunes, but starting next month they will also be shown on OWN, potentially exposing the shows to a new audience. OWN, a joint venture between Ms. Winfrey and Discovery Communications, described it as a 10-week “limited engagement” for the soaps, but if the episodes perk up the channel’s daytime ratings, they will most likely become a permanent addition to the schedule.
“All My Children” and “One Life to Live” will be shown back-to-back starting at noon Mondays through Thursdays. The test run will start on July 15.
“For two years you posted, tweeted, Facebooked me. … I heard you,” Ms. Winfrey wrote on Twitter in announcing the addition of the soaps to OWN’s schedule.
Some soap fans had pleaded with Ms. Winfrey to help keep the two shows alive after ABC announced that it was canceling them in early 2011. At that time OWN was just a few months old, and some people wondered if the channel could invest in the shows.
In a Web video response to those fans, Ms. Winfrey pronounced herself a soap opera fan but said the declining ratings for “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” made a revival effort on TV untenable. “There just are not enough people who are at home in the daytime to watch them,” she said.
Much has changed since then. Most important, the company that licensed the soaps from ABC, Prospect Park, came up with a much cheaper production model. For the new version of the soaps, the actors are paid under a different structure, the episodes are shorter (a half-hour each, rather than an hour) and they are filmed in a state, Connecticut, which provides a 30 percent tax incentive.
The soaps came online in April on the streaming Web site Hulu and on iTunes, the online store operated by Apple. Almost immediately Prospect Park realized that the TV-like release schedule — one new episode of each show each weekday — wasn’t working on the Web.
The company needed hundreds of thousands of viewers to watch every episode in order to break even, but the executives there studied Web traffic and concluded that they were “posting too many episodes and making it far too challenging for viewers to keep up,” as they put it in a letter to viewers in mid-May. At that time the release schedule was cut in half.
This week they adjusted the schedule again. “Mondays are now soap days,” Prospect Park said in a statement, explaining a new weekly format. “Now viewers will be able to choose to watch one episode each day or binge view some or all of that week’s shows at once starting each Monday,” the company said.
In essence, Prospect Park is giving soap fans maximum flexibility on the Internet while getting back into a television rhythm with OWN. The terms of the 10-week deal with OWN were not disclosed, but it will almost certainly help Prospect Park recoup some of its production costs.
For OWN, which struggled out of the gate but has been slowly building a loyal audience, the deal provides some fresh daytime programming.
“These shows have proven to be very popular with a significant, loyal fan base, not to mention Oprah herself is a big fan,” Erik Logan, the president of OWN, said in a statement. “Many of our viewers across numerous platforms have expressed their passion for the soaps, so we are especially excited to air this limited engagement on OWN.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/business/media/own-to-show-all-my-children-and-one-life-to-live.html?partner=rss&emc=rss