Where Will "The Guiding Light" Point Next?

(MoneyWatch)  Even if you never watched the show, you probably saw that CBS and the program's sponsor, Procter & Gamble, pulled the network plug on soap opera "The Guiding Light" after a mere 72 years coming over one form of airwave or another. Of more interest than the cancellation (since most daytime soap operas are flirting with death), is the still open question of what happens to the show from here. P&G is making rumblings that it will continue in some form. "This show started as a 15-minute radio show, and then it was a half-hour television show, so it has adapted over the years," a P&G spokesperson told The New York Times.

P&G may be considering a way to continue the the show because what killed it, in its current form, may be its adherence to an old distribution model that helped steepen its ratings decline. In all of the stories I've read about the show's cancellation, people pointed out that no one sits home and watches soap operas in the middle of the day anymore, and, frankly, I've never heard a more ridiculous point. Have these people never heard of DVRs, time-shifting and streaming video over the Internet? The problem could well be that much of the potential audience for the show has never had much exposure to it, so while soap operas like "Grey's Anatomy" and "Lost" capture viewers (and let's face it, those shows are soap operas), a show like "Guiding Light" doesn't.

Right now, the show has a minimal online presence. CBS' TV.com only has clips, not full episodes. (Oops. I goofed that one. A reader informs me that that they are online; I must have been looking in the wrong place.) While P&G could put the show on cable, I'm wondering if online will be a key part of its strategy going forward, in whatever form "The Guiding Light" takes from hereon in. The reason is that P&G, in addition to being one of the world's biggest advertisers, is also one of its smartest, particularly in the digital realm. It has craftily used digital to build vast consumer databases and is sponsoring other types of content online. I don't expect it will give away a decades-old content property easily, especially when barriers that may have completely killed it off in the past -- such as higher production and distribution costs -- are no longer as much of an issue.