Gotta love that Medici TV.
Tomorrow, January 24, they’ll be streaming a FREE, live Hélène Grimaud concert from the Cite de la musique (whose website makes them look very cool as well). The e-concert is at 7pm UTC (that is, 1pm New York City time).
Medici TV streamed Hilary Hahn and Josh Ritter’s Verbier performance two summers ago, and it was really beautiful footage. I love the way the image automatically goes to full-bleed on the screen. I wonder if they’ll ever start charging, or offer an e-concert subscription package a la the Met Player. For an interview with Medici TV director Hervé Boissière, see PlaybillArts.
Are live streaming concerts something American presenters could team up with local television stations to produce, or do we think it would be prohibitively expensive here? Would there be problems with American musicians’ unions?
I noticed that you said “full-bleed” for a screen image. Is that standard terminology? I’ve never seen anyone use it in that context.
My friend Alex says it, but I get a sense that it’s more of an aesthetic description than a technical one. -AA
I’m not feeling the love for the medici.tv website. It starts playing a video as soon as you hit the homepage, which is poor design from the get-go. A load of stuff gets displayed on the left half of the screen, where it’s in the way until you click it shut. If you want to read it anyway, you find that the text cuts off at the bottom and you can’t scroll down. There’s that control bar that hangs in the middle of the page by default, so it’s another thing you need to move. I’m a hard-core classical music consumer, and they’ve got loads of content that interests me greatly, but the site design is such a pain that I don’t bother. C’est dommage.
I adore live, streamed performances, but in my experience they are insanely expensive–hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s for the equipment, the man-power, the orchestra and stagehands, plus massive promotional expenses to spread the word broadly. Maybe if the presenter could get union concessions well in advance, maybe at the negotiating table? Sometimes orgs are able to get concessions by pitching the value to the community, or the PR benefits of having a national/international presence.
I’d be very interested to hear about anyone that’s had luck teaming with a TV station to stream live performances…in the cities I’ve worked in, TV is in nearly as bad shape as the print outlets. Mostly it’s independent production companies that work on these projects…and charge a pretty penny. These one-off or discrete projects are the type that corporate underwriters like to put their names on though. Makes it easier to justify the massive time, energy and resources that go into such neat initiatives.
Amanda, since you work primarily with soloists and not large ensembles, maybe streaming would more feasible and affordable…I bet there would be a real online audience for rare chamber pieces or new music. Oooh, or an online festival…that’s something that a major performing arts center or presenter could get behind.
Other thing to consider is that when you’re listening to streamed performances, the audio is not going to be anywhere near the quality of a live performance or a produced CD. Computer speakers just don’t do justice to professional musicians.