Coloratura on demand: Met Opera adds HD streaming

Opera tends to be a love it or hate it form of artistic expression; I fall strictly into the latter camp, since I tend to feel the vocals ruin what otherwise might be a fine piece of music. That should provide some useful background for the following statement: I have watched online streaming of opera in HD, and I came away impressed.

Next week, New York City's Metropolitan Opera will launch a service that allows opera buffs to stream performances to any computer with a broadband connection and enough horsepower to handle the HD.

The Met Opera has always been interested in getting its performances out to the opera-loving public that exists far beyond its New York City environs. It has broadcast live performances on PBS stations for years and, two years ago, it started offering HD recordings as well. These recordings, as well as historic, audio-only broadcasts (one dating from 1937), will be made available through the service. The Met plans on adding both archival and new recordings as time goes on. Those performances will be sold for both ad hoc and subscription viewing. A single performance will cost $4-5, while the monthly subscription fees will run in the neighborhood of $15.

"I am delighted that the Met’s incredibly extensive archive of video and audio performances will be so easily accessible to opera lovers everywhere," the Met's Music Director, James Levine, said in a statement. Opera lovers may have easy access to the streams, but that doesn't mean they'll actually be able to do anything with them. The HD video comes in a Flash wrapper, but the recommended system requirements for HD are pretty hefty: multicore processor, a gigabyte of free RAM, and 32 MB of video RAM. Most computers sold within the last two years should fit the bill, but I have no idea of what the Venn diagram of opera lovers and owners of current hardware looks like.

The Met offers the curious a preview site where users can see how well their setup will work out. In my case, additional software was needed before the stream would play, but the service quickly popped up a window that tested the new code before it launched into the preview clip. They were apparently not kidding about their minimum hardware requirements; my 2.3 GHz Core 2 Duo devoted much of its attention to keeping the clip running, and my disk has been thrashing ever since, as most of the programs I use seem to have been pushed into virtual memory. Maybe installing Flash 10 would help here.

The network was even more problematic, as the stream pretty much saturated my DSL connection, resulting in some stuttering and sporadic screen freezes the first time through. A second viewing went completely smoothly, however, suggesting that hitting pause at the start and letting the download run for a while ahead of viewing would eliminate any trouble. What that didn't eliminate was the CPU requirement, which kicked my laptop's fan into an audible spin; not the sort of thing an opera buff is likely to tolerate.

But live opera is as much about the visuals as the sound, and here, the service really impressed. Switching to full screen mode was, in a word, stunning. And remember, I don't really go for this stuff.

Some people clearly do and, with a price that's in line with various movie services, the Met Opera's video streams are likely to find some takers. How many is hard to judge, given that the audience will need a combination of initial interest, hefty hardware, and significant bandwidth.

Still, the fact that we're considering the size of the audience says a lot about the status of online video, which has shot from curiosity to cultural phenomenon in a few very short years. I will ponder that as I hunt down some decent music to listen to, like Beethoven's 7th.

Resource - Ars Technica