It sure seems that streaming services are being run by and for folks who clearly think folks in my age bracket are afterthoughts. And that’s a shame, because I happen to fall into a clearly growing sector of it that continue to embrace, pivot and even default to them, despite their inability to grasp the reality that’s walled gardens that inhibit ease of navigation is perhaps the core reason why their subscriber targets, and hence their road to profitability, remains a mission statement for most of them.
That’s sure the case with Disney Plus, particularly with the many missteps they have made in miscalculating both the quality and the degree of urgency that they counted on with substantial fan base of the MCU. And that’s also true for the most part with Hulu, which aside from its cadre of FX-branded series and its Live Channels option has fired far more blanks with its original content than the occasional bullseyes like THE HANDMAID’S TALE and ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING.
So it’s almost understandable that there was a bevy of global promotion that hit the trades that appeal to those non-Boomers this past week for what was trumpeted by the likes of TECH RADAR’s Carrie Marshall in this fashion:
The best streaming services tend to approach new episodes in different ways, so while Netflix has long offered entire seasons in single binge-worthy bursts the likes of Prime Video and Apple TV Plus prefer to drop new episodes once a week. And now Disney Plus is getting in on the act with yet another way of scheduling seasons. Its new Spanish drama Return to Las Sabinas, the first five episodes of which are already available, will be getting one new episode every day for the next 65 days.
And THE LAUGHING PLACE’s Marshal Knight was acting as a de facto shill with his clickbait-optimized (bullet points seem to improve engagement) version of the news that dropped yesterday morning concurrent with those first five episodes:
Disney+ is trying out a new format with the upcoming series Return to Las Sabinas.
- Just as CBS is preparing to bring the first new soap opera to network television in decades this January, Disney+ is trying to bring the concept to streaming.
- Return to Las Sabinas, a Spanish language soap/telenovela, dropped its first five episodes today on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ around the world.
- Deadline reports that the rest of the 65 episodes will be released daily, Monday-Friday, testing a new format and release strategy for the streamer.
And earlier this month, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Georg Szalai gave the executive responsible for it a gushy victory lap to share her story with his readership:
The Walt Disney Co.’s streamer is gearing up to launch a very different type of streaming content with Regreso a Las Sabinas (Return to Las Sabinas), a 70-episode daily series from Spain that kicks off with the first five episodes on Oct. 11. The remaining episodes will be released one a day Monday to Friday starting on Oct. 14.
Sofia Fábregas, vp of original production at Disney+, Walt Disney Co. Spain, discussed the experiment of bringing such an ambitious melodrama production to the streaming world in during an event in Madrid on Tuesday. After all, the Disney+ show is the first daily streaming series made in Spain.
Disney and its brand are about quality and premium content,” Fábregas said during a spotlight session at the Iberseries & Platino Industria conference and market in Madrid, appearing with Jordi Frades, director of the series and managing director of Spanish production company Diagonal TV (Isabel, The Bookshop, The Patients of Dr. Garcia), which is owned by European production giant Banijay. And bringing a format that has long worked well on traditional TV, such as long-running daily soap operas and telenovelas, to the streaming world can fit that bill.
“If it’s a daily melodrama, and if it’s a premium series, ultimately, the brand value is there,” she concluded.
Yeah, Sofia, some of us already know that. Because had you or your publicists had actually bothered to do a shred of research, you might have stumbled onto the fact that a competitor of yours has beaten you to the punch. By a little more than two years on the platform, and almost 60 for the format.
What, it would have been so hard for any of you to Google like I did and land on a plethora of stories that dropped waaaay back on August 3, 2022, such as this one from CNN’s Sandra Gonzalez?:
NBC has announced “Days of Our Lives” will stream exclusively on Peacock starting September 12, marking the end of a broadcast run that has spanned more than 14,000 episodes and began when Lyndon B. Johnson was president.
New episodes of “Days of Our Lives” will be posted daily on Peacock, the streaming service that is already home to the show’s library and spin-off “Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem.”
Now, mind you, I’m not chiding Disney nor Fabregas for being unjustified in their theories. Here’s how their competitor’s newly installed top dog trumpeted the logic of their move in Gonzalez’s piece:
“This programming shift benefits both Peacock and NBC and is reflective of our broader strategy to utilize our portfolio to maximize reach and strengthen engagement with viewers,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman, NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, in a statement. “With a large percentage of the ‘Days of Our Lives’ audience already watching digitally, this move enables us to build the show’s loyal fanbase on streaming while simultaneously bolstering the network daytime offering with an urgent, live programming opportunity for partners and consumers.”
And Lazarus probably had access to proprietary data that perhaps supported the relative usage and engagement levels being seen on the platform by its portfolio of Telemundo-branded prime time novelas, the ones that lifted them ahead of archrival Univision with key demographics in prime time years earlier and continue to provide NBCU with one of its most profitable and bankable businesses.
And I’m sure both executives are at least as savvy as I am to the fact that younger female Spanish-speaking streamers disproportionately watch more content and have lower churn rates than the population as a whole.
What we don’t know, of course, is exactly how many of those people are actually watching DAYS or the Telemundo telenovelas on Peacock. When DAYS left NBC, it was far and away the least-viewed of the four broadcast network soap operas that remained, and as even Lazarus conceded a considerable proportion of them may not have the resources or tech savvy to have followed the show’s migration. They still do have the chance to, as its 60th season is well under way as of last month. Here’s the screen shot from its home page, as well as the release schedule, to prove it.
One would think someone somewhere might have been able to do this heavy lifting themselves. It certainly could have been spun into a positive that would have given Fabregas the mission statement nugget that this “groundbreaking” move on a global basis could set a course for something that our descendents will be watching, likely on a still-to-be-invented device, in 2084.
And it’s not like some of those who did report on this weren’t capable of getting deep into the weeds. Witness this other nugget which Knight dredged up:
- Hulu, prior to the full Disney buyout, tried airing new episodes of All My Children and One Life to Live after they were removed from ABC’s daytime line-up. The trial only lasted a few months.
Yep, an overly ambitious group of hucksters from a production entity called Prospect Park tried this very model. And at the center of that effort was Rich Frank, the onetime head of the Walt Disney Company and a past president of the Academy of Television of Arts And Sciences. Here’s how Wikipedia recounted how that went down:
In 2013, Prospect Park launched its own web channel, The Online Network, with revivals of the long-running daytime soap operas One Life to Live and All My Children.
On April 18, 2013, Prospect Park filed a $25 million lawsuit against ABC over One Life to Live, alleging ABC failed to honor its part of the licensing agreement. Among the issues named in the lawsuit are allegations of ABC’s attempts to sabotage Prospect Park’s revival of the soaps by killing off One Life to Live characters loaned to General Hospital, failure on ABC’s part to consult Prospect Park on storylines involving One Life to Live characters, and claiming that one One Life to Live character was actually a General Hospital character.[16]
On June 6, 2013, production of both shows was halted due to a labor dispute with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees labor union, which was resolved two months later.[17] On September 3, 2013, Prospect Park announced production of All My Children and One Life to Live would be suspended until the lawsuit with ABC was resolved.[18] On November 11, 2013, several All My Children cast members announced that Prospect Park had closed production and canceled the series again.[19][20]
Later that year it filed a lawsuit against ABC, the licensee of those series, and the Prospect Park Networks division filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014. ABC subsequently filed a countersuit seeking unpaid licensing fees.[22] TOLN was dissolved later that year.
You’d think someone with enough attention to detail all of this might have at least reminded Disney and Fabregas of this, if for no other reason for them to tap dance their way into reminding people how much more evolved Hulu and the business now is, and that production in Spain will allow for efficiencies and union-dodging that Sony can’t (won’t?) avoid.
Perhaps if publications and streamers still prioritized accuracy and attempted to instill it in those are tasked with the responsibilties of utilizing them, I might be even more optimistic for this move to be a step in the right direction for the challenge of giving people a reason to want to seek out a platform on a more regular basis, and not become another candidate to join the Serial Churner club that Evan Shapiro referenced in his AD WEEK NYC speech earlier this week.
Maybe now that the hype and hope is out of the way, Disney/Hulu and their team can prepare for how they will be dealing with that challenge in the coming weeks. It might just prove to be a story as compelling as anything that goes down in Las Sabinas.
Until next time…