Soap opera largely aired soap opera reruns, began to be phased out in 2012 and fully ceased operations the following year. The Daytime Emmy Awards, which honor soap operas and other daytime shows, moved from primetime network television to smaller cable channels in 2012, then failed to get any TV broadcast at all in 2014, 2016, and 2017. Several of the U.S.’s most established soaps ended between 2009 and 2012. The longest-running drama in television and radio history, "Guiding Light", barely reached 2.1 million daily viewers in 2009 and ended on September 18 of that year, after a 72-year run. "As the
Soap opera oil boom, premiering on September 27, 2015 during the 2015-16 TV season. The telenovela, a shorter-form format of serial melodrama, shares some thematic and especially stylistic similarity to the soap opera, enough that the colloquialism "Spanish soap opera" has arisen to describe the format. The chief difference between the two is length of series; while soap operas usually have indefinite runs, telenovelas typically have a central story arc with a prescribed ending within a year or two of the show's launch, requiring more concise storytelling. Spanish-language networks, chiefly Univision and Telemundo, have found success airing telenovelas for the growing U.S.