SoapCity

» see soapcity.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

American daytime soap opera is a genre turkey never imported. We had our own daily serials, on TRT and then on the private channels after 1990, and they ran in the evening rather than at two in the afternoon between commercials for laundry detergent. SoapCity was built for an audience I have never been in a room with. The honest reason it is here is that its ending turns out to be better documented than its life, and somebody should write the date down.

Sony Pictures Digital announced SoapCity in 1999 as the online half of a cable channel with the same name. The channel was going to air same-day repeats of the soaps Columbia TriStar Television produced, with an archive sitting behind them. It never aired. ABC and Disney got SoapNet to market first, and the contracts NBC and CBS held would not let their shows re-run on a network they did not own. Sony's own Game Show Network made a second channel awkward to distribute on top of that.

The website outlived the channel it was supposed to promote. SoapCity ran the official sites for NBC's Days of Our Lives and CBS's The Young and the Restless, and Procter and Gamble Productions contracted it to handle As the World Turns and Guiding Light as well. Four network soaps living on one Sony domain is a strange arrangement to look at now, when every show's web presence belongs to whichever network airs it.

It was created and executive produced by Michael Fairman, a soap opera journalist rather than a web person, which shows in what the site actually did. News and catch-up synopses were the bulk of it, with story analysis on top. The part that was early was the video: SoapCity sold same-day downloads of Days and Y&R, plus an archive advertised as reaching back to their 1965 and 1973 premieres, at a point when legal downloads of any television at all were rare.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Selling a soap episode as a download around 2001 meant selling it to people on dial-up, which is the problem every early video service ran into and none of them solved. What SoapCity had going for it was the specific shape of daytime viewing. Miss a week of a prime time drama and you have lost one episode. Miss a week of a daily serial and you have lost five, which is precisely the customer a paid archive gets built for.

The archive claim is the part worth pausing on. Days of Our Lives premiered in november 1965 and The Young and the Restless in march 1973, and SoapCity advertised episodes going back to those dates. Whether the full run was ever really sitting there is not something the record can settle now. The ambition of putting four decades of daytime television online in 2001, on a consumer connection measured in kilobits, is worth recording either way.

~ what got buried with it ~

The end is precise and nobody wrote it down at the time. soapcity.com served a working homepage, captured almost daily by the Internet Archive, through 26 september 2005, and the title on that last live page called it the soap opera capital of the world. Five days later, on 1 october 2005, the same URL answered with a 301 pointing at Sony Pictures' own soaps index, and it never served a page of its own again.

That is the whole death. There was no announcement and no farewell page. A redirect went in over a weekend and a seven year old site became a signpost to a corporate landing page, which Sony kept pointing there for well over a decade while holding the domain. The reference material that mentions SoapCity puts its death around 2001, four years early, and the only reason anybody can correct that now is that the crawler kept turning up every morning and logging what it found.

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