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SALT LAKE CITY — "Days of Our Lives" is moving to the streaming service Peacock later this month. The New York Times reported that another show, to be announced, will run in its place.
Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, said in a statement that the audience mostly watches the show digitally through DVR or Hulu already.
The fans reacted on the show's Facebook page with some saying that they won't move to the streaming service to continue watching.
Scott McKinsey, one of the show's directors, said the show would have been canceled if they didn't make the move, the Business Journals reported.
"All of your favorite characters will remain on the show for the foreseeable future. In fact, the prospect of 'Days' remaining in production for the long term just increased as a result of this move. Without Peacock, 'Days' might have been numbered on the network," McKinsey said.
The show depicts the lives of the Bradys and Hortons, and later, the Kiriakis and Hernandez families in fictional Salem. The show debuted in November 1965 and has aired 14,000 episodes.
The show's audience size has gone down from 10 million in the 1970s to less than an average of 1.7 million recently. This is far behind the top-rated soap, "Young and the Restless," which has an average of 3.47 million viewers according to the Hollywood Reporter.
With the show's move, NBC will not have any daytime dramas on its network. There will only be three soap operas left on CBS, "Bold and the Beautiful," "General Hospital" and "Young and the Restless."
Soaps have been on the chopping block for decades due to high production costs and tend to need more money to stay on the air. The recession in 2009 was partly to blame for CBS cutting "Guiding Light," which had been running for 72 years, and "As the World Turns," which had been running for 54 years, according to the Business Journals.
