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"All My Children" and "One Life to Live," the two soap operas that were canceled by ABC and then resurrected on the Internet, are returning to television, at least temporarily, through a deal with Oprah Winfrey's cable channel OWN.


Episodes of the soaps will continue to be available on Hulu and iTunes, but starting next month they will also be shown on OWN, potentially exposing the shows to a new audience. OWN, a joint venture between Ms. Winfrey and Discovery Communications, described it as a 10-week "limited engagement" for the soaps, but if the episodes perk up the channel's daytime ratings, they will most likely become a permanent addition to the schedule.
"All My Children" and "One Life to Live" will be shown back-to-back starting at noon Mondays through Thursdays. The test run will start on July 15.
"For two years you posted, tweeted, Facebooked me. ... I heard you," Ms. Winfrey wrote on Twitter in announcing the addition of the soaps to OWN's schedule.
Some soap fans had pleaded with Ms. Winfrey to help keep the two shows alive after ABC announced that it was canceling them in early 2011. At that time OWN was just a few months old, and some people wondered if the channel could invest in the shows.
In a Web video response to those fans, Ms. Winfrey pronounced herself a soap opera fan but said the declining ratings for "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" made a revival effort on TV untenable. "There just are not enough people who are at home in the daytime to watch them," she said.
Much has changed since then. Most important, the company that licensed the soaps from ABC, Prospect Park, came up with a much cheaper production model. For the new version of the soaps, the actors are paid under a different structure, the episodes are shorter (a half-hour each, rather than an hour) and they are filmed in a state, Connecticut, which provides a 30 percent tax incentive.
The soaps came online in April on the streaming Web site Hulu and on iTunes, the online store operated by Apple. Almost immediately Prospect Park realized that the TV-like release schedule -- one new episode of each show each weekday -- wasn't working on the Web.
SOURCE: BRIAN STELTER
The New York Times
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