SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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."
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday June 11 2019, @10:34PM
Movies? When I go to the movies the tickets are $3.99. I'm smart enough to do matinees and if I don't need a tub of oil with popcorn floating in it or soft drinks, and I can usually slip my own candy in my pocket and put a water bottle in my coat.
But I've watched many good plays/operas on PBS' Great Performances. You're right, it's not the same thing as being there live, just that WGBH/PBS does a good job with it.
This sig for rent.