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This Week’s Top Audience Stories: Hacking Your Local Arts Organization To Fit Your Needs

October 13, 2019 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

This Week’s Insights: Hacking your arts experience… When audience controls live-streaming of course there are issues… Why Netflix on Broadway is a win win… And another Facebook metrics scandal – why don’t we learn?… How projections are changing live theatre.

  1. Hacking The Museum Tour: Does the standard audio-guide tour through the museum seem… a bit dull? Conventional? There are many ways to tell stories with art – which pieces to look at, what to say about it… For several years now, private tour companies have reshuffled “official” tours in attempts to retell museum collections’ stories in ways suited to people with specific interests. Making tours fun and participatory and irreverent and topic-specific is nothing new. But do these tours deliver on their promises? “I found some of the interactive portions of the tour superficial and a bit corny, but the younger, millennial members of the group seemed to enjoy them. Bringing games, imagination and creativity into the art viewing experience certainly makes the museum seem less stuffy and more relatable.”
  2. The Manifest Problems With Live-Streaming: The video game platform Twitch has become the go-to for live streaming – more than YouTube or Facebook. But how do you police live streams? How do you stop all manner of noxious, illegal and horrifying live behavior from being broadcast to huge audiences? Leaving such decisions to users is problematic in the least…
  3. A Netflix Movie In A Broadway Theatre? Why? It seems counter-intuitive. These theatres were designed for live performance. They’re expensive. And why would you want to see a movie in a theatre theater? The streaming giant Netflix is renting the Belasco Theatre in midtown Manhattan for a four-week, eight-shows-a-week Broadway-style run of its latest major feature, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Howard Sherman explains the benefits that Netflix, the Shubert Organization (owner of the Belasco), and Broadway more generally could get from the unusual arrangement.
  4. Another Facebook metrics Scandal: A proposed settlement says Facebook would pay $40 million for falsely inflating video metrics. Where to start? First $40 million is insignificant to a company that generates billions as a matter of regular business. Second, haven’t we learned by now that trusting metrics of views and clicks is a dumb way to measure value? “The suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth of the problem. “The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,” stated an amended complaint.”
  5. How Projection Is Changing The Theatre Experience: Projection design is that cool part of theatre where – poof! – an entire kingdom can freeze over, as in the Broadway and touring versions of Frozen, or where, in Anastasia, “a stage-spanning LED wall displays landscapes that move in tandem with [a] train.” And it’s more portable than a physical set that has to be moved. It’s a melding a physical and digital experience that is becoming more common.

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

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