I don't think it would creatively benefit any of the current hour-long soaps to go down to 30 minutes. Sure, in our fantasies where we serve as both the head writers and the EPs, it would cut out a lot of the deadwood in the casts and allow them to focus on their most successful stories and interesting characters. But in practice, that's almost definitely not what would happen. (A 30-minute GH, for instance, would probably focus almost exclusively on Sonny, Carly, Jason, and a few of their family members). I also can't see how it would make much economic sense to drop down to 30 minutes, unless it boosted the viewership numbers a lot (as you'd have many of the same fixed costs with a 30 minute show, so you'd maybe get a 20% production savings while producing half the content).
All that said, I think you make a very important point about how people consume video content today. The media companies that own these shows should be doing a much better job of monetizing that content in various forms. When I watch an "episode" of GH, I actually watch it in fan-made clip format, categorized by the main characters in the scene. (So I can choose to skip over, say, "Sonny/Justine"). There's no reason why Disney/ABC can't do that too and find a way to make extra money off those short clips.
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prefab1 ·
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