In an interview with Digest, Prospect Park chief Jeff Kwatinetz explained the rationale behind cutting AMC and OLTL back to two new episodes a week from the current four. "Every day, tens of thousands of people start with episodes one and two and we want those people to keep doing it," he says. "What happens to the viewer on June 1 who goes online because they're hearing the shows are good and they're seeing that there are 30 episodes of each show? What are the odds that that person is going to say, 'Oh, I'm willing to watch 30 episodes?' We started to see very clearly that people were going to be daunted by that and we don't want to turn off new viewers. It's important that we build the viewership and we want people to feel that the shows are accessible, which is kind of the whole point why we're doing this online to begin with." He admits that he did not anticipate the move. "We were surprised when we saw that people were watching it a lot more like online viewing instead of the way they watched the soaps before," he notes. "Looking back now, it seems kind of obvious to me, but we obviously thought that the way we were doing it was the right way. But now that we see how people are watching them, we don’t want to ignore it; we want to react to it." For the full interview, check out an upcoming issue of Digest.
Jeff Kwatinetz Explains Change To AMC/OLTL
