Thursday, March 15, 2012

Netflix for Opera

The Met released an iPad app for their popular on-demand streaming service. Read the review from NPR.


Caltrain classical

Every time I ride the train, I think about how music is living code. My daily commute from Palo Alto to SF contains a special talent pool: front-end engineers who roll .js, back-end engineers who push the stack, graphic designers who tweak CSS, app devs who crunch iPhone vs. Android and every other type of web, eng, dev and designer in the valley. Side-by-side we sit together and work for the morning's first hour.

Today I did something different; I plugged my headphones into my iPad and plunged into the river Rhine, climbed up the magic rainbow, and got my perspective reset by James Morris as Wotan and Christa Ludwig as Fricka.

Details:
104 videos and 262 audio-only performances
Dates range from 1936 to today
Limited social engagement: send a Tweet from the app
English subtitles on most operas

Requires a subscription to Met Opera on Demand.
Get a free 7-day trial on the Met's site.




The social integration reduces to simple Tweets sent from the app. Can we imagine a social consumption experience for Opera that transcends one-way tweeting or comments? How could we all watch and tweet together?

Other apps that do classical music well: NPR