djwildbill wrote:

Not sure how many years it’s been but “Days Of Our Lives” is no longer available on any Canadian OTA channels anymore; it’s on the W Network yet still on America’s NBC. I was surprised to see this when I finally noticed the change.

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According to the article, Days Of Our Lives is not on OTA TV in the US either.  NBC moved it to Peacock in 2022 and that was their last daytime soap on the network.  Days is not on NBC Detroit which is the channel I get for the network.

djwildbill wrote:

Not sure how many years it’s been but “Days Of Our Lives” is no longer available on any Canadian OTA channels anymore; it’s on the W Network yet still on America’s NBC. I was surprised to see this when I finally noticed the change.

Days moved from NBC to Peacock Sept 12, 2022.

In addition, viewers who got NTV from NL got to watch each episode of days a day early as they broadcast the feed for the next day.   Since they ran a lot of of Global programming they did it without making a big deal of it.  Some higher up finally caught on and read them the riot act and they had to run the show on the appointed day.  But it was still fun watching the "traffic report" on their news update with the same stills each day showing no traffic.  Kind of quaint seeing traffic for the island including, of course, the metropolis of Goobies.

Alas, once it moved from Global to the W network, NTV stopped airing days.
 

djwildbill wrote:

Wonder if this will be a new trend - to move soaps to a specialty network. I guess, much like a majority of sports have been moved from regular networks to specialty channels.

They already tried that. It was called Soapnet, a U.S. cable channel that showed nothing but network soap operas and shows related to them. It was owned by ABC and all of their soaps were on it, including General Hospital and Ryan's Hope, as well as old classic daytime dramas from years past. Somewhat ironically, Days Of Our Lives was also one of the programs it carried. 

It also carried reruns of prime time soaps like Dallas and Knot's Landing, in addition to its own "Entertainment Tonight"-like news programs, dedicated to soap operas. 

It hit cable in in 2000 and was gone by 2013. What happened? So many people bought DVRs and recorded the shows themselves that the bottom fell out, and the network collapsed. And with the declining popularity of the genre, there were eventually fewer soap operas to show and the final curtain came down on the channel.

No one else has tried anything like it since. 

[Edit: To be fair, Pluto TV has episodes of The Young & The Restless in its Daytime TV section. But that's accompanied by things like Judge Judy and The Drew Barrymore Show, which are clearly not soap operas.]

The Short History of Soapnet

Last edited by RadioActive (February 5, 2024 9:55 pm)

When the Y & R hits its 55 year mark, it will have surpassed As The World Turns run of 54 years on CBS. Two more years and it will tie the 57 [television] years Guiding Light spent on CBS.

This is from 1984 and I'm not entirely sure how this came about. It appears Global got the rights to The Young & The Restless from a competitor, who immediately stopped showing it. Because it was a daily show, in those pre-Internet days, there my have been some people who could no longer see it. So the new network put this ad in the TV Guide for fans who were afraid they might fall behind on the latest plot twists. 

I would love to hear what that phone recording sounded like!

It was 87.7 FM and there are still a few former analogue Channel 6 TV stations using it specifically for radio. They're called "Franken-FMs" and the FCC in the U.S. has more or less grandfathered them in following the transition to digital. Probably the most famous is MeTV FM in Chicago, which plays oldies and actually does surprisingly OK in the ratings. 

I wonder if any US network will ever launch a new daytime soap again. I don't believe there's been a new soap opera since NBC launched Passions in 1999.