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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: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 12 2019, @09:06AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday June 12 2019, @09:06AM (#854579) Homepage
    Given that we've had the National Theatre Live, and the Bolshoi Ballet, in our local cinema for years, I don't even see why this is a "new thing" at all. OK, it's a "broadway show" rather than "theatre" or "ballet", but if you can't see that deep down it's just "shit that goes on on stage", and the precise shit doesn't matter, then you're a few screws loose somewhere.

    And what does "recorded live" try to convey. You can't record something after it's happened, you can only record it whilst it's happening.

    This basically sounds like old tech, and I beg to differ, it's useful old tech, which is why it's persisted in several contexts, with new branding.

    Back in my day (80s/90s), the local taxi company could be used to deliver your kebab or pizza from restaurants that didn't want to employ their own delivery staff. Now we have "deliveroo". It's the same fucking thing, except that deliveroo doesn't also deliver poeple. So it's worse. Yet it's worth billions, and the taxi companies are scratching their heads saying "but we're still here, we can do that, we always have". There are many other examples. (iTunes in the 2000s is just MP3.com from the 1990s, etc.)
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