The Metropolitan Opera has over the past 16 years built a lucrative business around broadcasting operas live into movie theaters around the world, attracting an audience of millions for classics like “The Magic Flute” and “Madama Butterfly.”
Now the company is hoping to build on that success: The Met announced on Monday that it would begin livestreaming some operas directly into living rooms for customers who live far from cinemas that broadcast its productions.
The service, called “The Met: Live at Home,” is part of the company’s efforts to expand the audience for opera, at a time when it is grappling with financial challenges brought on by the coronavirus pandemic as well as longstanding box-office declines.
Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement, “We wanted to make the Met available to people who don’t have ready access to the movie theaters that carry the Met, whether you live in the mountains of Montana or the capitals of Africa.”
The service will be available in the United States and Canada to customers who live at a distance from movie theaters that broadcast the Met’s “Live in HD” series of operas each season; the exact distance will vary depending on the market. It will also be accessible nationwide in another 170 countries and territories where the Met does not offer live transmissions. Depending on the location, each opera will cost $10 or $20 to stream; viewers can watch the operas an unlimited number of times during a seven-day window.
The Met is one of many cultural institutions experimenting with livestreaming, which became a popular way of staying connected with audiences during the pandemic, when in-person performances were curtailed. The San Francisco Opera has been broadcasting some performances live for $27.50.
The Met’s movie theater program began in 2006 and before the pandemic generated about $18 million in net profit for the Met each year.
The new streaming service poses the possibility of cannibalizing some of those sales, though Gelb said using technology to limit its geographic reach would help mitigate that risk. He said the company had no plans to phase out the movie theater broadcasts, which have sold nearly 30 million tickets and are now available in about 2,000 cinemas in 50 countries.
“We don’t want to replace the movie theater experience at this point,” he said. “We want to augment it.”
The streaming service will be available starting on Oct. 22, when the Met begins its cinema broadcasts. (This season, 10 productions will be transmitted.) The first performance will be Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea,” which opened the Met season last week to largely positive reviews.
