Live To Your Local Cinema

The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting

M. Barker

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137288691
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

The digital broadcasting of performances to cinemas, or 'livecasting', burst onto the world scene in 2006. This book explores the reasons for its rise, examines the aesthetics of filming theatre and opera performances, and explores who the audiences are and what they want.

1

Introduction: The Success Story with No Name

Abstract: Introducing the phenomenon of ‘livecasting’, this chapter recalls its history, and the range of contributory forces which shaped its emergence. Originally known only under its industry name, ‘Alternative Content’, the idea of beaming live performance events into cinemas had been conceived some years earlier, but primarily as a means of promoting the sale of expensive new digital projection systems. The first successful events were in 2006, when the New York Metropolitan Opera, driven by difficult financial circumstances, took things in an unexpected direction. The surprise success of these events led other arts organisations to develop the format, and to begin to create institutional infrastructures for these events. But the issue of a public ‘name’ for them remains unsettled.

Barker, Martin. Live To Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137288691.

On the last weekend of 2006, the New York Metropolitan Opera launched a new initiative. Captured by up to a dozen high-definition digital cameras in front of more than 3,000 attendees, a live performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was beamed to 100 digitally equipped cinemas in the USA, the UK, Canada, Norway – and, with a delay, Japan. This followed close on a slightly earlier glitzy experiment in which Puccini’s Madame Butterfly was relayed to screens in Lincoln Center Plaza and Times Square to an assembled crowd which included many New York celebrities. The Magic Flute – itself to be the subject of a further experiment in March 2007, when a performance was audio-streamed to the internet – was the first of an experimental run of six beamed performances, which also included Bellini’s I Puritani, the world premiere of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, and was the first and most visible sign of a new phenomenon which was to grow and expand at a breathtaking pace. Variously known as ‘simulcasts’, ‘cinema livecasts’, ‘beamed live performances’, they were and are known to the cultural industries that spawned them simply as ‘Alternative Content’. To one of the few small pieces of academic writing about it that I have to date located, they constitute ‘digital broadcast cinema’ (Heyer, 2008). This book tells the story of their emergence, and explores their impact and significance.

This phenomenon, which spans theatre, opera and ballet performances, various kinds of concert and some prestige sports events, has not yet received any significant academic attention. Yet it surely deserves it. It is being seen, as I will shortly show, as among the leading-edge developments encouraging the digitisation of cinemas. Box office takings from these events are attractive in at least three ways. They are attracting back to cinemas audiences who had largely deserted them. They command a higher ticket price – with the bonus that many people book for whole seasons at one go. And they are, in the main, sell-out successes. In the words of a 2012 Picturehouse Cinemas promotional advert, this is nothing less than ‘transforming your cinema’. They also pose a series of challenges to many traditional theories in fields such as cinema studies, theatre and performance studies, and television studies.

How did they come about? The brain-child of the NY Met’s new General Manager Peter Gelb (who had joined the company from Sony), these broadcasts were the response to worrying times at the opera house. Ticket sales for its huge 3,800-seat theatre had fallen to below 75 per cent. Traditional sponsorship sources were drying up (in 2006 the Met had to be rescued by a $25-million personal donation from Mercedes Bass, wife of Texan oil tycoon Sid Bass). The average age of its audiences had reached 65. Gelb’s challenge was to ‘attract a younger, more hip, audience to opera ... the intellectually curious arts consumer, people in their 30s or 40s who, for example, like art-house cinema’ (UPI, 2007a). This was a tricky manoeuvre, Gelb being quoted variously as not wanting to ‘dumb down’ performances, but aiming to put opera ‘back in the mainstream’ (UPI, 2007b). The events certainly proved attractive. American carriers reported 91 per cent capacity audiences, seven UK cinemas sold out, and Canada’s reached 75 per cent. The $17.95 charge – considerably above normal cinema prices – compared very well with prices at the Met itself, where tickets could cost up to $350. And for this you got a close-up ‘front-of-house feel’.

The turn to digital cinema

But this was about much more than just opera. Here was a development which had been brewing for six years, with ideas, technologies, companies spinning off at a perilous rate.¹ The launch date was 2000, when the first viable digital cinema camera was announced. Initially limited to pre-screen advertising, its potential to address several of cinema’s fundamental troubles nonetheless looked enormous. Print costs had topped $1,800 per unit. Digital unit costs could be as low as $300 (Merritt, 2004). In one presentation, David Hancock from Screen Digest estimated the studios’ potential savings at an annual $2 billion. Meanwhile, falling audiences in many countries found cinemas struggling, and this not long after a boom in cinema building. Digitally equipping cinemas could expand the repertoire, and – if non-traditional materials could be found – lead to the mecca of higher unit prices.² In the six years up to the Met’s launch, a veritable cauldron of ideas was stirred – not least the development of a complex business model known as the ‘Virtual Print Fund’ (a mechanism for managing the costs of digital installation, but which has been argued to suit commercial cinemas taking films close to their release, and to disadvantage cinemas showing specialist films to minority audiences). ‘Alternative Content’ became a watchword – but entirely, for now, among interested business and industry insiders, who were multiplying greedily:

At last month’s ShoWest, the annual industry showcase in Las Vegas, conventioneers got a taste of the Super Bowl in 3-D, according to Brad Brown, president of the marketing company Brown Entertainment Group. ‘It’s the Wild West for alternative-media sources’, he says. ‘Nothing is unexpected anymore’. (Galupo, 2007)

But the initial ideas had little to do with things like opera. It was to the Super Bowl, the Tour de France, international football and pop concerts, that is, mass sports-and-entertainment spectacle, that providers expected to turn – although other early enthusiasts included Fox Faith, who saw the medium as a means to distribute religious films. Experiments included Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical transmitted to an invited audience in Los Angeles to demonstrate Boeing’s satellite system, which caused a stir when it drew repeat audiences (Canadian Corporate Newswire, 2001), and a Morrissey concert in six US cities (PR Newswire, 2005). Other early ideas included showing rave films on nightclub screens. But before anything could go beyond this experimental stage, there had to be agreement within the industry on technological standards and protocols. The launch of digital audio in the 1990s had seen too many competing systems, and the studios were determined not to allow this to be repeated. So everything stayed pretty much in-house until 2005, when the cross-studio Digital Cinema Initiatives, with input from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and the American Society of Cinematographers, delivered a huge report detailing proposed technical specifications (Digital Cinema Initiatives, 2005).

This overcame the first hurdle. Now producers needed something to persuade cinema owners, who were often distinctly reluctant to invest in the technology (Forde, 2002b).³ The prospect of 3D film was one key component in the persuasion package (along with the general advocacy of individual figures such as George Lucas, who had hoped that his Spring 2002 digital release of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones would kick-start cinemas’ uptake). Digitisation would enable the introduction of 3D, which would in turn allow cinema, at least briefly, to outstrip television (another re-run, surely, of the introductions of colour, widescreen, Dolby sound and so on). Also, sophisticated encryption systems could reduce risks of piracy. Early developments were focused on digital’s general cinematic possibilities, with Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) being among the earliest films to test the market. The first digital projector (the Christie CP2000X) debuted in 2005, but was marketed so aggressively that the studios backed away. The first film really to demonstrate the potential to be gained from 3D was Chicken Little (Mark Dindal, 2005), which grossed $300 million worldwide. Even more to the point, ‘Digital cinema was in its early days, and there were only a limited number of screens but in the end those screens, which represented about 15 percent of the total number, generated almost 85 percent of the revenue’ (Digital Cinema Report, 2011). This was good, but not enough. ‘Alternative Content’ became a device to persuade investors to bite the digital bullet.

Just occasionally, individual countries had for their own reasons begun the digital change-over – notably the UK, where the Digital Screen Network was created by the UK Film Council as a component in its strategy for promoting British films. This network enabled many small, independent, mainly art-house-oriented cinemas to install digital projectors. This of course then affected the whole early ecology of digital uptake and where its benefits could go (in small towns, commercial cinemas could become jealous of the head-start arts cinemas had gained when 3D arrived). And it perfectly suited the shift which then took place to offering high-culture Alternative Content.

Theatre-cinema, and other experiments

Cinema owners and managers had good reason to be cautious of the optimistic promises about digitisation, and not just because of the natural caution of those running knife-edge businesses. For those who knew them, the historical precedents did not bode well. There was a long tradition of attempts to link live theatre with television, some mainly forgotten. Louise Anderson (2010) has drawn attention to perhaps the earliest of these attempts, ‘Scophony’. Before World War II, and the hiatus this imposed on television, there had been experimental demonstrations of the possibility of planting TV’s small images on big screens. Anderson tells Scophony’s brief story as the first video relay system designed to present TV images on cinema screens. There was an initial demonstration in July 1930 at the London Coliseum, but the first practical trial was on 23 February 1939 at the Monseigneur News Cinema, Marble Arch. Both because of the War and because of Scophony’s inherent weaknesses, no more came of it. More widely remembered is 1950s theatre-cinema. Douglas Gomery (1985), its pre-eminent historian, tells of the studios’ attempts to reincorporate television into their operations, having been foiled in their attempts to buy the companies. Contrary to standard histories which have suggested that the studios ignored the rise of television, Gomery shows how acutely aware the studio bosses were of the challenge to their businesses. In the context of fast-falling cinema attendances, theatre-cinema attempted to sell the idea of showing sporting events and television dramas on large screens. A great deal of research went into the enabling technologies: ‘The major Hollywood corporations played an active part in this phase of innovation with their own experiments, demonstrations, and corporate maneuvers. For example, Warner Bros., in May 1948, presented its own version of RCA’s system to 3,000 invited guests at the Burbank studio’ (1985: 57). Notably this led, says Gomery, to a phase of experimental cooperation between the studios. By 1952, 102 cinemas had been equipped with their expensive kit.⁴

Peter Krämer (1996), drawing on Gomery’s research, argues that the studios, far from ignoring television, foresaw the inevitability of its rise, but their early attempts to manage its challenge were thwarted by anti-monopoly pressures. He also makes a case that among the studio owners were some, notably Sam Goldwyn, who foresaw that this would shift their business model to one in which more independent producers would develop projects – which of course became increasingly the model between the 1950s and 1970s. As companies adjusted to the fast-shifting conditions after World War II, theatre-television was tried out. These were transmissions to large screens of events such as major political speeches and sporting events. For the studios, the attraction was not just potentially boosting audiences, but, as Krämer argues, establishing that television could be a public, large-screen medium. However, high installation and transmission costs, Federal Communications Commission challenges and relatively low audience take-up meant that within a few years the experiment was abandoned. With these precedents, then, the vibes were not positive, even if the context was different.

But the NY Met, on a roll, was determined to build on its lead position.⁵ Its second and subsequent seasons increased the number of broadcasts, with eight livecast productions in 2007–8 attracting 920,000 people, and generating gross income of $13 million in the USA (with a further $5 million from abroad). This pushed other opera companies to try to get a share of the spoils. Sydney Opera House, the UK’s Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne, Gran Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona) and Teatro Real (Madrid) all eventually mounted livecasts, with varying degrees of success. The Met responded by imposing restrictions on cinemas taking others’ work during their own season.

A widely reported 2002 Cinema Expo International seminar among distributors and exhibitors (‘Beyond Digital Cinema: Alternative Content and New Revenue Sources’) brought many of the issues into focus. ‘Alternative Content’ was no longer an option; it was a necessity. The issues were simply how, and how soon. What was badly needed was reliable research on audience interests, to guide decisions. Wendy Aylsworth from Warner Bros. reported intriguingly on one experimental screening of an NBA playoff game:

‘Those people gathered to watch the event, and not the quality, because the game was out of town and they wanted to watch i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1  Introduction: The Success Story with No Name
• 2  The Aesthetics of Livecasting
• 3  A Portrait of Livecasts’ Audiences
• 4  The Many Meanings of ‘Liveness’
• 5  Livecasts’ Audiences Talk about ‘Liveness’
• 6  The Cultural Status of Livecasts
• 7  The Next Research Tasks?
• References
• Index