Costa Amor

Costa Amor tells the story of expatriate Dave and his love for Carmen, a Spanish beauty with a really mean boyfriend called Manuel. What sets Costa Amor apart from other soap operas and telenovelas is that it ‘airs’ on the BBC website.

Do you watch your soaps online?

Costa Amor is similar to the line of popular children’s books from the mid-1980s called Choose Your Own Adventure. The online soap features scenarios and the visitors were able to vote on what would happen next. For example, in the first episode, Dave encounters the beautiful Carmen at a restaurant where she serves him fish and chips. It’s love at first sight for Dave, he asks Carmen to join him for a walk on the beach later and she agrees, but wants to bring her boyfriend along as well.

During their initial encounter, Dave simply orders his fish and chips. Visitors were given three options to choose from in Carmen’s response, the options included:

• Carmen gives him her telephone number.
• Carmen tells him they only have octopus.
• Carmen compliments his English.

Visitors chose the first response. Throughout the serialized, cartoon soap opera’s 32 episodes, Dave and Carmen struggle against their feelings, infidelity and opposition from others. In the cliffhanging final installment, Manual throws them off a cliff and the couple struggles to survive.

Costa Amor is an online format soap opera linked to the Spanish language section of the BBC website. The purpose of the soap is two-fold: entertainment and education. Many college classes use a similar form of education for students seeking to learn Spanish as a second language. For example, at Northern Virginia Community College in Virginia, distance education students rent a Spanish telenovela for each semester of their Spanish classes. The students watch the telenovela and complete assignments related to its viewing as a way to immerse students in the understanding of the spoken language.

The online soap opera Costa Amor serves a similar purpose for native English speakers considering holidays abroad in Spain and other Spanish speaking countries. Each episode features an interaction and a way to ‘listen’ to the audio files of the interactions in Spanish with English translations appearing under the dialogue text.

Will online soap operas become more the norm going forward? Many soap operas in the United States including The Young and the Restless, the Bold and the Beautiful, Passions, As the World Turns and Guiding Light are available for Internet viewing. Independent film makers and student film makers create their own projects and air them through video podcasts on the Internet and writers enjoy creating serialized storylines via their social networking websites.

Online soap operas will likely maintain a separate production value from traditional soap operas, unless the Internet medium becomes the primary choice for all television entertainment watching. Since 2002, more and more episodes are being made available via Internet services including Hulu, iTunes, official websites and more. Costa Amor is simply one example of a fun and interesting trend in entertainment.

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