Number of words – 345

Gelb knew that Opera and other Arts organization worldwide were watching their costs rise more rapidly than the ticket prices. Raising ticket prices further could impact affordability to the general public. So the opera was doomed to do the clichéd: trim administrative and other costs in various ways and increase revenues from other channels, for example from foundation and individual donors.

Gelb subsequently considered whether the Met might increase ticket revenues on some other interesting ways. His colleagues moved into divergence, assuming that total ticket revenues were defined roughly as the cost per ticket multiplied by the number of seats in the hall. How about increasing the size of the auditorium? And how about doing so not by decreasing seat pitch and legroom and cramming in additional rows of seats, like the airlines have known to be doing, but instead by creating an even more radical, more ambitious new approach.

Fashioning what can most certainly be deemed a brilliant new box helped launch the Met: Live in HD, a Peabody and Emmy award winning series of performances. Transmissions that are beamed live simultaneously in movie theatres around the world. The series allowed hundreds of thousands of people to watch the Met’s performance simultaneously at a price that is much more modest than that of most tickets sold at the Lincoln Centre. The broadcasts are in high definition video and give audience members the feeling of having front row seats, or even better, since the video cameras capturing the performance can zoom in on the stars and solar system of each Opera, but also pan out to capture the biggest dramatic ensemble sequences. The Met in HD is now broadcast on more than  1500 screens, in  more than 50 countries, to an average of 250,000 viewers in 6 continents worldwide. So much for declining audience and so much for plummeting revenue! This dazzling new live High Definition performances are delivering the Metropolitan Opera Association Inc upwards of millions in additional revenues each year.

Excerpted from ‘Thinking in new boxes’ by Alan Iny and Luc de Brabandere