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Finally listed to this podcast, thanks for posting Helene! So much respect for Peter Boal! Having to reprogram Sun Valley festival and this upcoming season so many times and all the challenges to rehearse, oh my goodness! We are lucky to receive the filming equipment and personnel from Key Arena. I thought the new footage was really well done, especially the Leta Biasucci debut in Emeralds. I will watch it many times again during Rep 1. I hope we have a chance to see the Sylvia pdd again and James Moore in The Calling sometime this season.

I saw Elusive Muse a number of years ago but haven't been able find it since. It suddenly appeared on youtube.

I think ABT missed the boat on this 12-13 years ago. My anecdotal evidence is my aunt who flunked out of her junior year of university because she was going to the Met every night as a standee. When the opera season ended, she continued going to the Met every evening to see the Royal Ballet on tour, largely out of habit. I had hoped that ABT would capitalize on the new habit of going to the cinema to watch the Met in HD on Saturday afternoons. Now I think it's too late, because other companies have established themselves in the cinema market. And in truth, although she is always happy to

I suppose it's reminiscent of the Andrea Andermann real-time and on-location telecasts of Tosca, La traviata and Rigoletto. In those performances the conductor and orchestra worked from a studio. Here it would be a matter of giving the audience in the theater a satisfactory orchestral sound.

I don't think they're ready for HD prime time quite yet, but I'm going to give them props for at least trying to be a touring company. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a teen in San Antonio, ABT gave me one of my earliest looks at a fully-staged, live ballet performance.

Thank you for the link! I just watched for a few minutes switching between the various live views and it's really kinda cool. I'll try to catch the whole thing before they take it down.

Some of the same old same old from me, but it seems like a way to get there. Buzz words: Distancing, face masks, small dance groups, audience spacing, outdoors etc. and step-by-step. The Cincinnati Ballet https://www.fox19.com/video/2020/09/25/cincinnati-ballet-gears-up-first-performance-months/

The Zurich Opera is livestreaming its prodution of Boris Godunov right now. https://www.opernhaus.ch/en/spielplan/oper-fuer-alle-digital/boris-godunow-ofa/ What's interesting is that conductor Kirill Karabits and the chorus and orchestra are off site (but also being streamed). The opera can be watched on demand for 48 hours starting tomorrow morning from 8 am CET.

Some time ago I read that the Met had gained 15,000 new subscribers to Met on Demand since they started the nightly streams, so that's paid off. Originally those were just going to be through the original end of the season but their popularity may be providing the Met with its main source of income at the moment. I thought ABT would be the logical choice because its and the Met's season wouldn't overlap and the technical infrastructure would already be in place. And the Met simulcasts have introduced a lot of people to opera who wouldn't otherwise go--the La Boheme crowd if you will. I co

But ABT is America's company! [/sarcasm]

Well, if they wanted to view an opera more than once and at the time of their choosing—including spreading it out over more than one viewing session—they might. Yes, it's possible to download the free streams and save them to watch later, but I have to assume that most of the on-demand subscriber base isn't going to do that, either because they don't know how, don't have the requisite disk space, or can't be bothered.

Yes, absolutely. The Met not only has 14 years of experience with HD broadcasts to draw on, but also its 90 year history of live radio broadcasts. Whether explicitly stated or not, part of its mission has been making its performances regularly available to butts that are in seats somewhere other than its own theater. It's a legacy they should want to protect. That being said, circumstances might allow them to burnish that legacy with the right partner with the right institutional support. (By "institution" I mean a foundation or public arts agency.)

Huh. Good to know. I've only been checking out the free offerings since the first week in May and so far I've only encountered a few repeat casts.

The Met in HD's are produced professionally and are top quality. Their directors and production staff have a lot of experience. They tape an earlier performance to be sure that they have backup footage. The Met Artists in Concert programs that I've seen so far are of the same quality, despite being in different venues. (And are a great bargain, in my opinion.) I can not imagine the Met wanting any partners associated with their brand, unless the partners could guarantee similar quality.

Probably not. At this point it's mostly repeats, which may be a strategic decision. If the Met were to stream its entire video archive, would viewers bother subscribing to Met Opera on Demand?

Hmmm ... maybe. The Met would likely need more than one dance partner in order to keep the pipeline of dance performances full. One advantage the Met has is the sheer volume of new content in generates via its weekly HD and radio broadcasts to bolster—and refresh— its sizeable back catalogue. It's been posting a free performance from its on demand catalogue every night for going on thirty weeks with only a handful of repeats in the mix. (They have five different videos of Aida, Othello, La Bohème, Don Giovanni, and Carmen to choose from and at least three for a long list of operas one tier dow

Ballet West Principal Dancers Beckanne Sisk and Chase O'Connell - a tribute to first responders and front line workers everywhere.

4 Trailblazing Ballerinas discuss their careers, their experiences coming up as dancers of color and their experiences now.

and Karl Paquette is now teacher at POB school

SFB Principal Dancer Sasha De Sola notifies Dulce Ximena from Guatemala that De Sola will be her ballet mentor for one semester:

Seems like if they needed a ballet partner ABT would be the logical choice, no?

I guess the question would be: Is the Met actively looking for digital platform partners? Many companies continue to go it alone, during quarantine; although they obviously look around at what other companies are doing.

Polish National Ballet has finished their run of Manuel Legris' Le Corsaire successfully.

Hard pass. If that is the best ABT can offer (a stale video of Ferri past her prime) maybe they deserve to go under. Sorry to be harsh but these are harsh times.

First, thank you @Kathleen O'Connell for those clips. pherank, I was hoping another arts org would partner with the Met Opera. It already has a platform that is pretty good for showing video, can handle volume. It has a price point that makes it worth the company's while but is also somewhat affordable.