Just two weeks after they transported All My Children and One Life to Live to the Internet, the producers have decided to cut in half the releases for each show to 2 days a week each, from 4 days.
New episodes of All My Children will debut on Mondays and Wednesdays, and new episodes of One Life to Live will premiere Tuesdays and Thursdays, starting Monday, May 20.
The move is designed to avoid overloading viewers with content and bring the average viewer's experience in line with what it was when the shows aired on ABC — when most fans only watched two or three episodes of the soaps per week, according to bosses Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz.
"In the past these shows had their vast majority of views within the first 24 hours," Frank and Kwatinetz said in a statement. "Instead, our shows are primarily consumed on different days then when they originally air. Fans have been binge-viewing or watching on demand, and as a result, we feel we have been expecting our audience to dedicate what has turned out to be an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows. We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much."
The new release schedule will not impact production. Kwatinetz and Frank said they realize not all fans will be happy with the change.
"We know our viewers will be upset as they would probably prefer more shows to less." they said in a statement. "We apologize to these viewers and ask them to please understand we are trying to ensure our shows succeed and not meet the fate they experienced previously. We need to devise a model that works for all viewers. ... When it comes to online, as with all new technology, it's adapt or fail."
Prospect Park needs each episode to be seen roughly 500,000 to 1,000,000 times to break even.
TV Guide