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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 11 2019, @06:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the kinda-defeats-the-purpose dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Meet the Netflix for Broadway shows

What if you could stream the Tony Awards' big winners like Hadestown as easily as you fire up Netflix?

Enter BroadwayHD. Founded by a husband-and-wife team with a combined 83 years of experience in the Broadway business, the niche service is like Netflix for theater. It offers a library of plays and musicals to stream on demand for a $9-a-month subscription. These aren't those out-of-focus iPhone recordings of your nephew's fifth-grade talent show. BroadwayHD specializes in live captures of high-end theatrical productions with HD or 4K cameras and the same audio that feeds into a theater's soundboard.

BroadwayHD doesn't have any of Sunday's Tony-winning productions like Hadestown, The Ferryman or Oklahoma. For now, it takes whatever it can get, which means most of its shows have ended their live runs. But the fact that BroadwayHD exists at all is a feat. Until three years ago, no service like it had ever ventured online.

One of the main reasons: For people who worship theater, including many who make it, live tapings skirt uncomfortably close to sacrilege.

"[Some] people sign up to do live theater because it's live. Your memory of it is right there, right then, and you leave with your experience," said Sydney Beers, general manager of the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, which set a Guinness World Record with BroadwayHD for the first livestream of a Broadway show. "For some people, they feel strongly that you're not meant to be able to go and rent and watch again."


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday June 11 2019, @08:27PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday June 11 2019, @08:27PM (#854360) Journal

    Doing the same play every night is archaic. Do one show, with the best actors, and the best sets, and then distribute the video of that*[...]

    Some will rail against that, like the e-reader vs. racks of magazines thing. But it will be good enough for most people, and better in some ways.

    I don't have any problem with anyone enjoying whatever they want. If some would prefer to watch videos of recorded theatre, I have no problem with that -- though I'd imagine many would prefer a medium more suitable to such performance (e.g., an actual film adaptation).

    But I do think your argument is a bit overstated. Why do people pay to go to concerts? Can't they just hear their band on a recording? Is it "archaic" to experience a live event in that case too? And why not go further and question -- is it "archaic" to actually attend a sporting event? I mean, you get a better camera angle on the baseball on TV than you ever would at Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium or whatever. Yet for some weird reason, tens of thousands of people line up to attend live sporting events every week in almost every major city.

    Perhaps you don't find the special thrill some people do in a live theatrical performance. Perhaps you don't find it in a live musical performance either. Or perhaps you do but don't think the extra cost or hassle of going to a live event is worth it. But there are also lots of people who do, and don't think live performance is merely "archaic." It's actually qualitatively different as an experience.

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