‘All My Children’ and ‘One Life to Live’ Head Online

Two daytime soap operas slated for cancellation have found an afterlife on the Internet, as more companies splash out big dollars for original programming on the Web.
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC said Thursday that it has licensed “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” to Prospect Park, a production company co-founded by a former Disney executive. Prospect Park plans to distribute the decades-old shows, which ABC is taking off the air in coming months, over the Web and Internet-connected televisions.
The deal gives Prospect Park exclusive rights to the two shows for more than a decade, and pays Disney millions of dollars a year in royalties for as long as the shows are produced, according to people familiar with the terms.
The new deal offers a reprieve for the ailing daytime soap-opera genre, which predates the medium of television but has seen its audience shrink precipitously in the last two decades. CBS Corp. in recent seasons ended “Guiding Light” and “As the World Turns” after decades on the air. ABC’s move to end two more daytime soaps was going to leave the genre with just four remaining examples.
Prospect Park’s move to buy the shows is a gamble on the growing–but still relatively small–world of producing original, scripted content online. Earlier this year, Netflix Inc. struck a lucrative deal to buy exclusive rights to a new TV series starring Kevin Spacey. Other companies including Yahoo Inc. and AOL Inc. are also ramping up their efforts to make original web shows.
Prospect Park says that it aims to keep producing the shows, which currently air hour-long episodes five days a week, at the same “format and length,” although a person familiar with the deal said the production budget would be somewhat lower after subtracting ABC’s royalties.  Prospect Park is just beginning the process of meeting with actors and others involved with the soaps to work out whether they will stay on board, the person added.

Producers could sell the shows as an online subscription to consumers, the person familiar with the plans said. They are also exploring advertising sales and sponsorships or product-placement deals, the person added.
Talks to resurrect the two soaps began in May, less than a month after Disney announced it was axing them. At the same time as negotiations proceeded, soap-opera fans mounted various efforts to save the cancelled series, including an effort to collect mail-in coupons aimed at proving that demand for the shows is  greater than Nielsen Co. ratings suggest. But not all fans are happy with the outcome, arguing that online-only access would exclude soap opera fans who don’t use the Internet.
Flo DiBona, a consultant and soap activist who has been watching “All My Children” for decades described it as “an unacceptable solution,” adding it “would eliminate the ability of millions to see these shows.