The New York Times-20080124-Met Opera Abandons Plan For On-Demand Telecasts

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Met Opera Abandons Plan For On-Demand Telecasts

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The Metropolitan Opera has canceled plans to offer performances through on-demand television, a rare miscalculation in its march to show operas on screens of all sizes.

The Met is scheduled to transmit eight operas live to movie theaters worldwide this season. Thirty days after each broadcast, the performance was to have been made available through on-demand services provided by cable television companies.

On Wednesday the Met said theater operators had expressed worry that the 30-day period was too short and would cut into live audiences, so this season's pay-per-view menu was scrapped.

The fears seemed to catch the Met off guard, particularly given the success of the movie-house showings, which have filled cinemas across the country.

There was this real outcry from the movie theaters, said Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager. We were not aware they were going to feel this way until we announced we were doing this. He added: We are not a movie. We're a live transmission.

Under agreements with major Hollywood studios movies usually take much longer to reach on-demand services. Mr. Gelb said the theater operators might have worried about alienating the studios by allowing a shorter lag. He said he hoped to start the on-demand showings next season, for which the schedule of opera transmissions has not yet been made.

Under Mr. Gelb the Met has become a media juggernaut, providing live and repeat transmissions of operas around the country in movie theaters, on satellite radio and online. The pay-per-view showings were an element in Mr. Gelb's effort to spread Met performances electronically, and thus more widely.

The broadcasts will still be repeated on PBS as planned, the Met said.

The Met announced the pay-per-view program in November, together with In Demand Networks, which provides programming to cable operators. The company is better known for sporting events, Howard Stern and movies. Officials from In Demand did not return telephone calls on Wednesday.

The broadcasts were to have begun on Jan. 16, with Gounod's Romeo et Juliette.

In an e-mail message to The New York Times this week, Mark Abramowitz, a software engineer in Pittsburgh, called attention to the abandonment of the in-demand broadcasts.

I was looking for it in the listings, he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. I actually wrote to the Met and said, 'Hey, what happened to this?' They told me basically what I told you: 'It's kaput. Maybe next year,' they said.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Fans in a Manhattan movie theater watching the Met's performance of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, broadcast live last spring. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL NAGLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)