The future of Soaps

[te.]

I didn't exactly know how to title this thread, but with Corday suing Sony it got me thinking about the future of what we popularly call soaps, or rather daytime soaps - accessible melodramas that can be followed (almost) daily.

 

I pointed out in the Corday/DAYS thread that the current soaps need to learn how to monetize their products - live ratings are sinking year-by-year for every shows on television so selling or even syndicating old episodes will be key. They need to use the fact that they have such a large catalog of content to fund future episodes. Look at The Simpsons - it's losing money on its first run episodes but is making up for that by syndication and merchandise. The Simpsons is now a half hour commercial for their wast catalog - maybe that's how soaps should reason to stay on air?

 

At this point just uploading the episodes on YouTube would at least bring in some revenue, no matter how small...

[titan1978]

There isn’t one.  I truly think it’s limping to an ultimate death.  If they haven’t already utilized their back catalog to make money they are not going to start now.

 

If you follow a company like Shout, which releases things on DVD that major studios pass on, you know just how expensive moving older material into a new format is.  These are corporations, they want to make money, and the investment to turn these things into current money isn’t worth it to them.

 

Those ATWT/GL DVD’s sold well.  But for whatever reason, it wasn’t enough to continue.

[DramatistDreamer]

Are people still looking to DVDs for monetization?  I thought we'd already moved past DVDs and physical digital to streaming.

[titan1978]

Yes.  I just used DVD’s as an example of what happens with this niche material when it does get a release.  Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, but I think the moment in time for soaps to exist outside their daily airings came and went, and these fool studios and networks don’t see it as viable enough to try.

[DramatistDreamer]

 

Oh no, I completely agree. 

I just wanted to clarify that the difference in producing new material (which, like you said, isn't really feasible now, especially in a Mon-Friday form) and streaming classic material that has been in the can and on the shelves for years. I think the latter could be done with some ingenuity as the old AOL streaming platform and SoapClassics website showed (briefly) with some PGP soaps.

[RavenWhitney]

There's no future for network daytime drama.  The current shows are placeholders as the landscape changes.  Not only a result of technology but horribly unqualified and stupid executives who make dumb decisions.  Think Nathan Varni at ABC and Angelica McDaniel at CBS.  Plus they continue to hire hacks to produce and write the shows, and regurgitate the same stories: baby switch, evil twin, back from dead, DNA switches.