Less than one month after their debuts, All My Children and One Life to Live are undergoing a dramatic change: the shows will no longer air four days per week. Instead, Prospect Park has announced that each series will air just two new episodes each week. Episodes of the behind-the-scenes show, More, will continue to air on Friday in a combined format.
"This allows us to introduce a new episode of quality television every Monday through Friday and gives the audience a chance to catch up as we continue to build awareness and excitement around these new shows. Because Hulu agrees with our findings, for the meantime they will keep all of our episodes on Hulu.com for free to give viewers the opportunity to find us and catch up."
The company states that the first two weeks of the series' reboots offered information into how viewers were watching the shows and that it was determined that fans were being asked to devote "an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows."
Moreover, Prospect Park's and Hulu's data found that, unlike when the shows aired on ABC, "the majority of [..] viewers are watching one show or the other, not both, and they aren't viewing the shows when they did before. Most viewers, according to Prospect Park's data, are watching All My Children and One Life to Live between 12PM and 1PM or between 5PM and 7PM.
"We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much," Prospect Park added.
One upside of the change is that all of the episodes that have already been broadcast will remain watchable for free on Hulu.com. It had previously been planned to have only the ten most-recent episodes archived for free viewing on Hulu and that the entire season of episodes would be available on the subscription-based Hulu Plus.
New episodes of AMC will now run on Mondays and Wednesdays, and new episodes of OLTL will post Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The programming schedule change begins May 20.
To read the complete statement from Prospect Park, click here.
