"All My Children" and "One Life to Live" will now only air two episodes a week.
Prospect Park made the announcement in a letter to fans. In the letter, Prospect Park boss' Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz said they have been watching viewer habits since the shows relaunched online.
Beginning Monday, May 20, the soaps will go on the two episode per week schedule. New episodes of "All My Children" will air Mondays and Wednesdays. New episodes of "One Life to Live" will post on Tuesdays and Thurdays. The behind-the-scenes series will run as a single show on Fridays. Prospect Park says Hulu agrees with their findings, and in the meantime will keep all of the episodes on Hulu.com to give viewers the chance to watch for free. Prospect Park stressed this will not impact production. The soaps will film through mid-June, edit throughout July and then resume production in August.
"Today it is clear these shows have resonated, as many millions of views have been logged since our April 29th debut, a mere two and a half weeks ago," the duo wrote in a letter. "We’ve consistently been in the Top 10 shows viewed on Hulu and viewers and critics alike have told us how impressed they are with the quality of both programs. The past two weeks have been invaluable in terms of learning about how you watch and when you watch our shows on this new platform. We have gained enormous insight through our actual viewing data and our research."
According to their research, viewers are watching "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" on different days than when they're originally posted. "Primarily, 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. (As an example, for the substantial audience only watching on the weekends, we are currently asking them to watch five hours of programming to keep pace with our release schedule)."
Prospect Park also found that viewers are not watching both 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 letter said.
"During their ABC runs, viewers watched only 2-3 episodes on average a week and picked up with whichever day’s episode it was," Prospect Park said. "Our viewers seem to primarily start with the first episode and then continue forward episode by episode. Like with primetime serialized dramas as opposed to the traditional slower pacing of daytime, people feel lost if they miss an episode. People are starting from the beginning; the shows are designed for complete viewing from episode one. Yet starting from the beginning with the amount of episodes we are releasing is asking too much for viewers who need to catch up."
Watch the latest "One Life to Live" below.
