[James2001]

Looks like it's going to be 10 episodes for the first week, then 5 a week afterwards, going to take the best part of a decade to get through the show's run at that pace.

I expect someone will lose interest before then (the audience or STV). 

I don't know how successful soap archive is on streaming.  If it had a broadcast airing you might pick up occasional viewers (like with Classic Corrie, Emmerdale & Eastenders) but I don't think you'd get people coming back for this every week on streaming. 

Maybe they should upload some of the big, more iconic episodes rather than attempt the whole thing.

STV player have been doing the same thing with High Road for years (uploading a few episodes every week, going back to the start when they reach the end), presumably that's done well enough for them to decide to do the same with Brookside.

UKTV Play also put up The Bill from the start in the months leading up to Drama reaching the end and going back to 1998 as well (albeit in much bigger chunks than STV will be doing, around 250 episodes initially followed by around 100 episodes each month, dropping to around 50 when they got to the hour long ones in 1998). Initially UKTV said they were only going up to the end of 1993, but in the end actually kept going (and even went right to the end of the show's run- right now they have nearly 1000 episodes, from 1999 through to the end in 2010), so presumably enough people watched for them to keep sticking with it.

So that's two cases of the entire run of a continuing drama being streamed, Brookside isn't the first. Brookside does have more episodes than the other two though (even though it ran for a shorter amount of time than the others)