Soaps Online May Appeal to Young but Not Restless

Looking for a little downloadable love in the afternoon?

Bringing a new twist to one of television’s oldest forms of entertainment, Sony Corp.’s SoapCity.com is set today to offer digital versions of two popular daytime programs over the Internet. Viewers can download commercial-free installments of Sony’s “The Young and the Restless” and “As the World Turns” for $1.99 per episode and play them on their computers.

It’s the first time anyone has made a current TV series from a major network available online -- at least in a legitimate, non-pirated fashion. And it’s just an opening gambit for Sony, which hopes to use the same technology to deliver more shows from other companies, as well as its own vaults.

“We could use this platform for whatever we want,” said Mary Coller, SoapCity.com’s senior vice president and general manager.

The company is starting with soaps in part because each episode is short-lived and in scarce supply. Unlike other programs, which are recycled through reruns and syndication, the daily footage of most soap operas airs only once before disappearing into television history.

“This audience is very passionate about the product, which is the first thing we look for,” said Yair Landau, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment. “The fact that there is no other market made for an even more compelling reason to launch this service.”

Before it can expand its lineup, however, Sony has to get the distribution rights from the owners of other soaps, including Walt Disney Co.’s ABC. And ABC is more interested in distributing shows through SoapNet, its cable TV channel, than to the limited number of homes with high-speed Internet connections, said Brian Frons, president of ABC Daytime.

A more fundamental problem for Sony is that most people want to watch TV shows on a television set, not a computer monitor. Relatively few consumers have made the connections needed to move a downloaded show from a PC to a TV.

“I can’t imagine watching it on a computer,” said an Internet-savvy fan of “The Young and the Restless,” Eileen Horvarth of South Bend, Ind. “It just doesn’t interest me.”

In addition, the episodes are much bigger than the songs and pictures consumers routinely download. Users would have to wait 15 to 30 minutes to access one episode through a typical high-speed connection, meaning the service won’t lend itself to impulse viewing.

Nevertheless, Jack McKenzie, a senior vice president at Frank N. Magid Associates, a media research and consulting firm in Los Angeles, called the Sony initiative “smart.”

“We’ve known for years that these soap viewers are a special breed,” McKenzie said. “And anything that a programmer can do to keep that loyalty going and feed it is not only good for the viewer, it’s good for the program and the programmer.”

That “special breed” is predominantly female and middle-aged -- for example, half the viewers of “The Young and the Restless” this season are older than 56, Nielsen Media Research estimates. The average age of visitors to SoapCity.com is 36.

And although soaps remain lucrative -- “The Young and the Restless” generated almost $38 million in advertising in the last three months of 2002, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus -- their audience is significantly smaller than it was a decade or two ago. That’s because more women are working away from the house, and the ones that still are at home have far more channels to choose from than before.

Sony has made several bids to wring more revenue out of the genre. The company briefly rebroadcast its shows in prime time through satellite operator DirecTV, and it explored creating a cable channel for soaps but was beaten to the punch by ABC.

Such efforts proved that there is a market for watching soaps after they’re aired, Coller said. Meanwhile, the growing turnout at SoapCity.com -- 3.4 million unique visitors per month, up from 370,000 in 1998 -- convinced Sony that the audience for soap operas is more technically sophisticated than conventional wisdom suggested.

“They’re not sitting in trailer parks, and if they are, they have computers,” Coller said.

In addition to offering single episodes for $1.99, SoapCity.com will sell monthly subscriptions for $9.99 per series. Viewers will be able to control the playback the same way they do a VHS tape, using software from RealNetworks Inc. to play, pause, rewind and fast-forward the digital images on their computer.

Shorn of their commercials, the episodes last about 40 minutes. The absence of 30-second spots wasn’t Sony’s choice, Coller said, but rather a reflection of advertisers’ indifference. “I’m hoping that one day the advertisers will say, ‘Hey, I want in on this,’ ” she said.

The company expects to add downloadable episodes from three more soaps within a year, Coller said, probably starting with “Days of Our Lives.” The lineup also could include shows from a defunct soap or two, she said, such as “Santa Barbara,” to which Sony already holds the distribution rights.

What’s more, Coller said the company is planning to offer a service that would transmit episodes automatically to people’s homes, but they’d still be stored on their computers.

Larry Gerbrandt, chief content officer for research firm Kagan World Media, said that kind of automatic downloading would help solve the problem of long downloading times.

“One of the interesting things about this, when you really think about it, is that anybody with a VCR or a TiVo or a Replay [digital recorder] could do the same thing at no cost,” Gerbrandt said. “What you’re really paying for, with your $10 a month, is your inability to program your VCR.”