Soap opera community photos scoops news buzz and celebrities

This post originally appeared on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog on March 21, 2008. 

For a couple of weeks now, I've been planning to include some notes here on the Consortium's blog about a few of the sessions I had the opportunity to attend at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago. The event was a great opportunity to see many friends and colleagues, and it gave me a chance to learn more about the current state of a variety of research projects, as well as hear about some new projects and meet some interesting new faces as well. In the following series of posts over the next few days, I wanted to transform some of my random notes about the conference into a recap of sorts.

I originally posted this piece on Feb. 24, 2008, on the .MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

This piece was originally published  as part of an entry on February 10, 2008, on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

This piece was originally published  as part of an entry on February 09, 2008, on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

Last April, I wrote about the intriguing deal NBC struck with DirecTV to move its soap opera Passions over to the satellite provider as exclusive content, after the network had decided to cut the soap opera from its daytime schedule to make room for another hour of The Today Show.

This piece was originally published  as part of an entry on January 30, 2008, on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

After my daily intake of As the World Turns yesterday afternoon, I saw a curious ad, one that prompted me to write this morning.

This piece was originally published  as part of an entry on January 24, 2008, on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

For those of you who have followed my writing about soaps here on the C3 blog, you likely know that I feel one of the strongest thing the current daytime serial dramas have on their side is their history. As such, historical characters on the show today provide those contemporary ties to that deep history which I believe helps strengthen the transgenerational viewing patterns necessary to gain and maintain viewership for these shows in the long term.

This piece was originally published  as part of an entry on January 13, 2008, on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

Soap Operas as Brands

This piece was originally published  as part of an entry on January 14, 2008, on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

This piece was originally published  as part of an entry on January 14, 2008, on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

Product Placement and Soap Operas

This piece was originally published  as part of an entry on January 13, 2008, on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog.

Since most American soap operas have been on the air for decades now, these shows have legions of former viewers from previous generations that may not be as interested in the contemporary product but might watch the shows from their past if they could be reached and marketed to and especially if material could be packaged and contextualized in meaningful ways, rather than just airing every episode from the archive in its entirety--especially since many of those episodes no longer exist, especially from the early years. The potential value in this archive leads to a logical business model which directly integrates the available content from the many years in the air.