ABC has reportedly sold the rights to two of its longest-running television soaps, “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” to online distribution company Prospect Park, who plan to turn both series into exclusively online web shows.
We’ve had web-only shows for quite a while, but does this move from TV to net reflect a trend for something much bigger, or is it just a last-ditch effort to keep soaps alive for passionate followers? And with the high production costs for those shows, one also has to wonder just how both of these series will be paid for.
Image (cc) by Matt Marshall, Marshall Photography
In the traditional television world, production costs (writers, actors, cast & crew, etc.) are largely paid for by advertising revenue. And of course the companies that run traditional television advertising campaigns will pay millions of dollars for them. According to the Washington Post report, Prospect Park plans to keep the cast and crew the same. But then how will these online soaps, with their costly productions that run into tens of millions of dollars annually, get paid for when Internet advertising spending rates are a comparative tiny fraction of what companies will pay compared to traditional television ad campaigns?
On the surface it would appear that the business model itself may have challenges surviving, unless there are big changes planned either on the production side or the advertising revenue side.
Or perhaps not. Maybe the responsibility for paying for the online soaps will move to individual subscribers. For traditional television, most of us today pay monthly for cable or satellite services based on bundled packages. That money is used toward paying the licensing fees for the programming that we want, but also subsidizes arguably a lot of what we don’t want. And it’s expensive. If you want the full menu of choices on your cable or satellite system, it’s going to cost you. But these costs we pay only cover the licensing/distribution, NOT the costs of production of any of these shows.
Online content providers like Netflix charge users a flat fee, but then offer full access to the menu of their content. It’s a great model for choice, but could this model itself ever cover production costs of an expensive soap opera, not to mention being profitable? Maybe not today, but in the future if targeted promotional vehicles were used for growth as well as razor-sharp focus made on making production costs more efficient, perhaps this model could work. One nice advantage of the internet is it is much more easily and accurately tracked, so having a corporate goal to manage costs based on actual viewership could be effectively done.
Moving past the flat rate charges, what if these soaps could be purchased separately as a series, much the same way as you would purchase your music or video content from Apple’s iTunes store? In this way, you could purchase just what you wanted, and not be subsidizing other content you don’t want. Will there be enough soap devotees out there to support the web series and all that entertainment that’s stored in the cloud?
It’s almost like setting the ultimate stake in the ground. Do you want to watch these programs and are you willing to pay for them? We’ll see how this shakes out. It’s an interesting venture and if successful, may just be the start for paving the way for how we view, access, and ultimately pay for our entertainment in the future.
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