It’s been just two and a half weeks weeks since popular soap operas One Life to Live and All My Children were reborn as online-only shows — but production company Prospect Park has already decided to cut back on the number of new episodes released online each week. The change in schedule, the company claims, is due to the fact that viewers are “binge-watching” instead of watching one episode a day, and this makes it too hard for them to keep up.

Starting on April 29, Prospect Park — which licensed the soaps from ABC — ran new, 30-minute episodes of each show every Monday through Thursday, followed by a recap on Friday. The shows are available on Hulu and Hulu Plus, or can be downloaded from iTunes. They’ve received “millions” of views, Prospect Park cofounders Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz wrote in a letter to fans (PDF) this week, and have “consistently been in the top ten shows viewed on Hulu.”

But most viewers aren’t watching these shows the way they traditionally watched soap operas on TV. Instead, as with other TV shows online, “our shows are primarily consumed on different days than when they originally air,” Frank and Kwatinetz wrote:

“Primarily, fans have been binge viewing or watching on demand, and as a result, we feel we have been expecting our audience to dedicate what has turned out to be an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows. (As an example, for the substantial audience only watching on the weekends, we are currently asking them to watch five hours of programming to keep pace with our release schedule).”

In addition, viewers aren’t adhering to traditional soap-watching habits. When the shows were on ABC, “viewers watched only 2-3 episodes on average a week and picked up with whichever day’s episode it was.” By contrast, online viewers “seem to primarily start with the first episode and then continue forward episode by episode…yet starting from the beginning with the amount of episodes we are releasing is asking too much for viewers who need to catch up.”

Prospect Park is also concerned by the fact that, when the shows aired on ABC, viewers often watched both — but online things are different:

“The majority of our viewers are watching one show or the other, not both, and they aren’t viewing the shows when they did before. Part of the reason for choosing between the shows may be that the largest viewing takes place either between 12 PM and 1 PM (when people generally can only fit one episode during lunch time) or between 5 PM and 7 PM (when the vast majority of competing shows are a half hour long). We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much.”

Overall, Frank and Kwatinetz conclude that “When it comes to online viewing, most of us are just trying to find time to watch series comprised of 13 to 22 episodes a season — so asking viewers to assign time for over 100 episodes per show is a daunting task.”

So starting Monday, May 20, the schedules will change. Each soap will now air just two new episodes a week: New episodes of All My Children will air online on Mondays and Wednesdays, and new episodes of One Life to Live will air on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a recap episode on Friday. “Because Hulu agrees with our findings,” the founders wrote, “for the meantime they will keep all of our episodes on Hulu.com for free to give viewers the opportunity to find us and catch up.”

Frank and Kwatinetz acknowledge that “our most dedicated viewers will be upset,” but “we need to devise a model that works for all viewers and follows how they want, and are actually watching, online” in order to ensure that the shows “not meet the fate they experienced previously.” The

Production company Prospect Park, which licensed the shows from ABC, will run new, 30-minute episodes of each show Monday through Thursday. (Previously, each episode was an hour long and a new one ran each weekday.) On Fridays, there will be a recap of the week. Episodes are available for free streaming on Hulu and Hulu Plus, or can be downloaded from iTunes for $0.99 apiece or $9.99 per month (20 episodes). The free version of Hulu will only make the most recent episodes available, while Hulu Plus will have all of them.

The New York Times calculated that, because production costs are lower (due in part to having shorter and fewer episodes) and because ads on Hulu can be targeted, Prospect Park needs 500,000 streaming viewers to break even on the soaps. By contrast, the shows attracted three million viewers on TV. In addition, Variety noted that Prospect Park has the rights to sell the the shows to U.S. cable and broadcast networks starting in September (where, in an interesting twist, they’d be available a week after they air online) and is also distributing them to international television networks.

Even so, some longtime fans of the shows who are not accustomed to online viewing may be confused about how to find new episodes online. (That theory is borne out by many of the user comments on this paidContent post from January.) “We would hope that all [fans of the shows] would call their friends to make sure they watch them,” Prospect Park cofounder Rich Frank told Soap Opera Digest recently. “The way to ensure that this is going to work, because we’re really totally advertiser-supported, [is] that we’ve got to get the eyeballs to be watching this. They’ve done it before; it’s just a matter of rallying the troops and getting them to watch.”

“Through both of these partners, we hope daytime drama fans are absolutely delighted to be able to watch their favorite programs in a broadcast-quality HD format wherever and whenever they want,” Prospect Park CEO Jeff Kwatinetz said in a statement. (Prospect Park’s cofounder is Rich Frank, the former head of Disney Studios.) Prospect Park has also signed a consulting agreement with the shows’ creator, Agnes Nixon, to guarantee “her active involvement in their continued production.”

Hulu will handle ad sales and Prospect Park plans to offer “e-commerce and other digital marketing programs to brands and entities looking to tap into Hulu’s mass market demographic.” Episodes will be free on Hulu and Hulu Plus, and I’ve asked Prospect Park what they will cost on iTunes.

More details about the arrangement are forthcoming, but in a press release, Kwatinetz and Frank said that outstanding programming is the best way to attract audiences online: “We believe that by continuing to produce the shows in their current hour format and with the same quality, viewers will follow the show to our new, online network.”

ABC is airing its final episode of All My Children on September 23, and its final episode of One Life to Live in January. Prospect Park is picking up the soaps at a time when ABC is turning away from them: All My Children is being replaced by a food-focused daily talk show called The Chew, and One Life to Live is being replaced by a health and lifestyle show, The Revolution. And ABC parent company Disney transitioned its rerun-centered SOAPnet channel from cable to online last year, replacing it with Disney Junior.

Agnes Nixon, creator of both All My Children and One Life to Live, said, “I’m looking forward to working alongside these wonderful people as we ensure that the shows will continue with all the love and excitement we’ve always had.” But in addition to the other variables at play here, it is also unclear whether all of the shows’ current actors will continue. Some already have new arrangements — and others may have ego issues.