Streaming the Arts
I go to Midem under the auspices of the IMZ - The International Music Centre, based in Vienna. This slightly odd institution looks after the interests of producers and broadcasters of music and dance for television - so its fair to say that the membership might all count as wannabies! Certainly the earnest discussions and meetings on the IMZ stand seem to result in very little actual progress in co-productions and sales, although the daily Avant Premiere screenings are a welcome chance to see what people across the world have been up to in this worryingly niche market.
For the last few years, the question of finding the television arts audience and getting productions to them, at a time when conventional terrestrial broadcasters are reducing their arts coverage, has increasingly obsessed us all. (And don't believe the BBC's protestations about the quality and scope of their arts offerings, its more or less chimera). Its quite clear that there is an audience out there and a good way to reach them is via the internet. But there are quite a lot of problems.
There are still plenty of opera and concert relays to be had, if you like that sort of thing. The problem is that, whilst most countries in Europe still have State broadcasters who are required to broadcast a certain number of relays per year, the material is very often either mundane or ludicrous - this year's prize for crassness has to be awarded to Swiss Television, for their "groundbreaking" "La Boheme", filmed live in and around a Zurich tower block, which made my blood curdle.
So lots of investment is being poured into streaming and downloading arts events on the net and there were several very informative seminars about this at Midem. One particularly good session involved the new bosses of Medici - an American owned, pan European group of content producers and the British DVD company, Opus Arte, which is owned by the Royal Opera House.
The Medici man announced that they were streaming and downloading to hundreds of thousands of customers, but admitted that they were some years away from monetising the project and Opus Arte confessed that they weren't quite at the point of finalising a business plan for their yet to be launched download platform.
It was left to the floor to put some perspective on the proceedings. LSO live have been successful in getting their strong brand to its supporters, largely by CD, distributed conventionally as well as on the net. They, like the very impressive San Francisco Symphony Orchestra media operation largely eschew streaming and downloading, preferring to disseminate information and sales oulets via the net. Only the mighty Berlin Phil actually have a live streaming operation, their Virtual Concert Hall and their representative admitted that although in their first year they had over a million clicks on the site, this only translated to twenty thousand actual subscribers - a two percent success rate that seems to be mirrored wherever one looks in the magic world of classical streaming and downloads. Without the sponsorship of Deutche bank they would not be able to service even those twenty thousand people.
In addition, there are crucial elements which are the proverbial elephant in the room: Performers and Union agreements, copyright and publishing problems and - not mentioned very often, the fact that the copper wires that carry so much of the Internet, certainly in Europe are rather more suited to homemade clips on You Tube than high definition state of the art films. The average MP3 download carries a mere thirty percent or so of the actual musical information on a track - what on earth is the point of making beautiful high definition music films when they will end up looking as though they were shot with a handycam? (Always assuming you can download them cleanly in the first place)
Of course I'm being simplistic, the net will work for high quality television eventually, someone will work out how to pay for the content to be produced and get that content to the market in sufficient numbers - and that someone will make a lot of money and a lot of arts and music lovers very happy. Just don't junk your DVD player or your Sky Arts subscription quite yet!
