Explaining its decision to ditch plans to revive the soap operas online, Prospect Park states, 'The constraints of the current marketplace...simply proved too great a match even for our passion.'
- November 24, 2011
AceShowbiz -
"All My Children" and "One Life to Live" will not live online after all. Prospect Park has announced that it has put its plans to revive the ABC soap operas in indefinite halt after months of effort to launch the online version of the two shows met unresolved issues.
"It is with great disappointment that we are suspending our aspirations to revive 'One Life to Live' and 'All My Children' via online distribution," Prospect Park's Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinez said in a joint statement. "It is now becoming clear that mounting issues make our ability to meet our deadlines to get OLTL on the air in a reasonable time period following its January 13, 2012 ABC finale impossible."
"We believe we exhausted all reasonable options apparent to us, but despite enormous personal, as well as financial cost to ourselves, we failed to find a solution," Frank and Kwatinez added. They went on reasoning, "In the end, the constraints of the current marketplace, including the evolution and impact of new media on our industry simply proved too great a match for even our passion."
The Writers Guild of America, which was involved in the negotiations regarding the transitition, has expressed its regret toward the scrapped plans. "We were disappointed to learn that Prospect Park's financing fell through. Prior to the end of last week, we were close to a fair deal for the writers," so the association commented.
The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represents stars for both soaps, also revealed that their discussions with Prospect Park had no progress in the past few months. "We now conclude from the press reports that Prospect Park faced other challenges unrelated to our negotiations, which prevented continuation of those discussions," the union said.
In early November, there had been report that the online launch of "AMC" would be halted. Susan Lucci was said as one of the reasons behind the delay, but the actress was quick to deny it, saying it "is simply untrue." She went on claiming that she had expressed interest to be part of the online project in September, but she had not heard back from Prospect Park since then.
