BroadwayHD, a site that could become the Netflix of theater, launched on Monday. The site is the brainchild of Tony award-winning producers Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley; they’ve been working on this project for four years and have, at present, the rights to stream over 100 productions. Lane and Comley spoke with ThinkProgress by phone about how BroadwayHD was conceived, what musicals and plays you can expect to find on the site (and which shows you probably shouldn’t hold your breath for), and why they believe making Broadway shows available to stream won’t cannibalize ticket sales but will instead spark an interest in live performance among audiences who have extremely limited access to the theater.
TP: My understanding is these shows have been filmed for decades but those films are just getting stored at the Theatre On Film And Tape archive in the New York Public Library’s Lincoln Center branch and aren’t really available to the public. So your project is, in large part, about making something that already exists available to a wider audience, is that correct?BC: That’s pretty much it. Stew and I have been involved in some capacity or another with doing digital captures for 25 years. Stewart was one of the producers of The Will Rogers Follies in 1991, and Japan Satellite Broadcast came in and shot the show for broadcast in Japan. For years, there’s been an interest in stage-to-screen. But where the audience was, nobody was really sure. It was sort of the PBS equivalents around the world. The idea was, it’s Broadway, it’s high art, and not for regular “TV people.”
SL: Bonnie and I felt that the technology and the world had come to a point where there was enough platforms, enough interest, and the right technology to make this a viable option.
People say you can’t replace live theater, and we agree. But if you can’t get to see the live show, this is the next best thing.
BC: Once streaming was in everyone’s entertainment sphere of how they would consume content, and now there’s billions of dollars for real estate in movie theaters, people weren’t going to the theater. So the question was, how else do we get them here? And Peter Gelb, who was at Sony at the time, came up with alternative content: Very limited runs of live events in the movie theaters. Everyone jumped on board with that, from concerts to sporting events to theater. So he took that idea from when he was working at Sony over to the Metropolitan opera (Editor’s note: Gelb became the general manager of the Met in 2006) it was about, “Let’s get this stuff out to a wider audience, not just people who can come to Lincoln Center.”
SL: Where Peter saw it as seeing live performances in a movie theater, we saw it as something more retainable, and that’s to offer the streaming. To capture it and not let it disappear after the performance, and make it affordable, and go global.
TP: So how do you go from that relatively small-scale operation to building what you have, or hope to have, with BroadwayHD?BC: We worked on about ten of these productions over the years, and it was critically acclaimed every time. People would say, “Why don’t you do every show like this?” But the economics of it didn’t always work. So we sat down and said, how do we make this work? Let’s take what we have and put it on a website. But ten productions does not a site make. So we started looking toward our colleagues and other organizations and saying, “What else is out there?”
Our core content was going to be all Broadway, all HD, all in front of a live audience. But when we started trying to aggregate all our content in one place, we didn’t want to exclude other things we found that were beautiful: Stuff shot in SD, stuff from the West End. So we decided, the audience for this live HD Broadway stuff, they’ll love these other productions. We were trying to get the underlying rights for all of these — because at the time they were filmed, streaming wasn’t even a word, so it was back to the lawyers and the unions.
And then we asked, well, what makes a streaming website? What’s the lowest amount of content we can have on there? And 100 was our number. If you have 100 or more, that gives people enough. They can binge for a couple of weekends while we add another layer on top of it. So our first layer is over 100 titles, we have new stuff coming later in the week, and we’re constantly going to be adding to it, between adding things we’re licensing that we’ve already done.
SL: We have everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim. From Sophisticated Ladies from 1983 to Memphis that just finished its tour.
TP: What about shows that are currently on Broadway? Are people too wary of cannibalizing ticket sales to agree to that? Lin-Manuel Miranda has said that he wants to have Hamilton filmed, with this cast, by the end of the year. But I imagine there are directors and producers who are less eager to do that than he is.BC: It’s a great idea. And he is going to be one of the first ones to say that, because I don’t think he believes it will cannibalize his ticket sales. But the way we’ve gone about this business is to focus on limited-run, celebrity-driven shows, so we don’t have to worry about it, so we can go back and say, “This is working, and we’re doing research and exit polls on the live, in-cinema productions, and we’ve found that when people see these shows this way, it eliminates the risk of buying a ticket to see it in person. People see it in the movie theater and then go see the live version.”
You don’t want to do something that’s going to kill a multibillion dollar business.
SL: Once a movie is shown — or once a movie of a musical is made — it advances ticket sales. That happened with Chicago, it happened with Jersey Boys. They sold more tickets because of the movie. We see this as a way of promoting Broadway, not just on an American scale, but globally.
BC: We’re really trying to promote and preserve live theater. So we are saying: This is not the same thing. It’s like a sporting event. When your team is playing at home, you can go to that. But you can’t go to every game. And we believe our website, and watching these shows in this way, will only increase your appetite for the live event.
TP: How are you funding the site? And how did you determine what to charge per show or per subscriber?SL: It’s just us funding it for now. It’s $7.99 per show, and you get the rental for 48 hours, and a subscription is $14.99 a month.
BC: It’s based what other streaming sites are charging. It’s sort of a ballpark figure there, and the premium for the content we’re having, which is not the normal thing to offer.
TP: Why do you think it’s taken so long for theater to be a part of this streaming revolution? People have been able to stream movies, music, and television shows for years now. Is it that theater is too traditional a community to get excited about something like this? Is it that the difference between the cost of a single Broadway ticket and the cost of a streaming subscription is so much larger than the difference between, say, a movie ticket and a Netflix subscription? Is it the attachment to theater as a live art form that makes diehards wary of allowing these plays and musicals to be seen any other way?BC: It’s everything you just said. People say you can’t replace live theater, and we agree. But if you can’t get to see the live show, this is the next best thing.
SL: That’s our motto: If you can’t get to Broadway, get to BroadwayHD. I’d add that we’re at a time now where, over the last 30 years, as we build a library of digitally-shot shows — which you couldn’t do before because of technological or distribution reasons — we can go back to 1983. We have 30 years to draw on, to add a base to our library.
TP: Do you anticipate pushback? Have you already experienced any already?SL: I’m hoping the producers will treat this as an additional revenue source.
BC:Ever since we’ve been doing this, there’s been resistance. Instead of trying to convince the producers of Hamilton, Wicked or The Lion King that this was a good idea, we said, there’s other shows out there, let’s go shoot the other shows. With that, if we can show how well those do, we can say, “Look, X number of people are subscribing to this site, all over the world, who are interested in live theater. Make this amount of money in this amount of time for your Broadway show.”
It’s a multibillion dollar industry. They don’t want to make fast moves. You don’t want to do something that’s going to kill a multibillion dollar business. So everything is calculated, everything has to move slowly, and I think that’s why Stewart and I were able to make so much headway, because we’re part of the Broadway community. Stewart has been a theater owner for years. So we’re not coming in trying to exploit or kill the business; we’re trying to promote it. And I think that’s why we’ve made so much progress, because we’re working with our colleagues: This is what we’re doing, where it’s going, these are our goals.
SL: Currently, Bonnie and I are either producing or are affiliated with five Broadway shows that are running.
What’s next for BroadwayHD? Are there shows you’re trying to get, anything big on the horizon?BC: One that’s already done is Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, a historic performance for Audra McDonald. We brought on a partner for that one: HBO. HBO has done shows like this before. They did the solo shows: Will Ferrell, Whoopi Goldberg, John Leguizamo, Billy Crystal. They have definitely come in and shot a lot of things that are Broadway shows, so Audra’s fit right into that. That’s what it’s about, having partners, because these things are very risky and difficult to do, so the more partners you have, the better off.
TP: Do you think there are going to be some shows that are always out of reach? I can’t really imagine Disney, for one, giving up control of their brand and sharing the streaming rights to any of their shows.SL: Neither can I.
BC: Cross that one off your list. No Lion King, no Aladdin.
TP: When can people expect a new batch of shows to go up on the site? Do you expect to be at this 100 mark for a while?
Theater, statistically, reaches a better educated, higher-income bracket, and we’re just making this available and affordable to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.
BC: It’ll come in in smaller installations. It’s not going to come 100 at a time. This 100 took us a lot of time to work on. But it also will be easier in a lot of ways, because with a lot people on Broadway, we kept saying, “This is what we’re going to do.” And we got a lot of, “That’s lovely, but give us a call when you’ve got it all in one pile.” And I understand that. The bigger players can sit back and say, “Let’s see where this goes.”
We’re going to get the haters that say, “How could you do this? How can you say this is live theater?” But so far, all the response has been so positive, because it’s for people who say, “I see how this will promote live shows or be a revenue source for the original production, and the underlying rights holders of these productions.”
TP: Do you think part of this movement to make Broadway more accessible is that the shows on Broadway have themselves become more accessible: More pop and rock music, more mainstream stories?BC: Absolutely. Because if you look at what is actually on Broadway stages in the past 20 years, what used to be just, oh, it’s Shakespeare or Sondheim, it’s now the Disney Shows, Wicked, Hamilton, Something Rotten. So that’s what has made it possible for what we’ve digitally captured get the interest of a much broader audience.
TP: Do you think the positive reaction to BroadwayHD is driven, in part, by people who think tickets to these shows have become astronomically expensive? There are lotteries, student tickets, senior discounts, but still, it’s the rare family of four that can afford to see, say, The Book of Mormon, especially if they have to get to New York from out of town, pay for a hotel…BC:We’re live producers, so I will tell you every cent that you pay for a live show is worth it. We’re not doing this to make it economical, because it’s not the same experience, it’s just not. It’s like going into a museum and there’s a Picasso, and then you can get a print of it for your wall. They’re both lovely. But they are not the same.
SL: Theater, as you know, statistically, it’s better educated, a higher-income bracket, and we’re just making this available and affordable to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.