Oh, Netflix. I know you’re perfect for me, but the chemistry just isn’t there. You’ve got everything going for you, it’s true. You have over 100,000 titles to choose from, your delivery is fast and efficient, and you have so many different options for viewing. But it’s just not working out.
First of all, you won’t let me watch instantly on my computer. Apparently I don’t meet the system requirements, as my Mac only has 512 MB of RAM and you require 1 GB for Mac (PC users only need 512 MB). What is that all about?
Secondly, you frequently don’t have the operas I want to see. You have an OK selection, but not enough to keep me from depositing my sparse savings into the Music and Video department at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble. (R.I.P., Tower Records.)
Thirdly, it’s just not happening. There’s simply no spark. I order DVDs from you, and they just sit on my coffee table in their red envelopes, buried under bills and Met programs, waiting for me to make the time commitment to actually sit down and watch one of them. I know I chose them, but by the time I get them, I’ve lost interest. In theory, $13.99 a month is a good deal and there are all those great films I should be watching, but I feel like I’m wasting my money.
Enter your new rival: Met Player.
For only $1 more per month than what I’m currently paying Netflix—and less, if I go with a yearly plan—I can have instant, online access to both video and audio recordings of live Met performances.
Met Player, which offers both subscription and one-off rental options, offers 60 opera videos streaming directly onto your computer screen—some from the recent HD screenings, some from past television broadcasts—plus 140 audio recordings. All you have to do is click Play. Then you can sit back and enjoy watching Sutherland’s Lucia, Pavarotti’s Nemorino, or Fleming’s new Thaïs.
For many years I didn’t own a television, and so became accustomed to watching DVDs on my computer. It could be a three-hour Bollywood musical or even a Wagner opera, and I was perfectly content to pull up in front of my desk, plop my dinner on the unused keyboard tray, turn the lights low, and enjoy some quality entertainment on my smudged-up laptop screen, the blissful soundtracks streaming through my piddly built-in computer speakers. Occasionally, the film would stall as an instant message popped up on my screen or I would hear the “cling” of a new e-mail coming in and couldn’t resist the urge to see what it was. But I was content in my ignorance.
This all changed the day I bought my huge flat-screen TV. Overnight, my relationship with Mac’s DVD player all but came to an end. Once I tasted the luxury of being able to watch TV while lying in bed or hear what was going on while running to the kitchen for more Ben & Jerry’s (I mean, uh, baby carrots), trying to get my entertainment while hunched over my workstation suddenly seemed philistine.
When Met Player happened, I wondered if I was now too spoiled to go back to my television-deprived ways. But the temptation of watching some of the Met shows I’d missed this year, such as Doctor Atomic and La damnation de Faust, gave me strength. And when I was offered a free trial subscription, I was afraid I’d never leave my apartment. But I can sense you may have some questions already.
“Can I have DVDs delivered to my home by mail, instead of watching online?” Nope. Sorry, it’s Internet streaming only.
“Are the HD-quality videos actually better than the normal old ones?” Yes. They have clearer picture and sound.
“What about subtitles?” Check. They all have optional English subtitles, and the HD videos also have French, German, and Spanish.
“Can I keep them?” No. It’s not possible to save the videos as a file, burn them to DVD, or copy them onto your iPod. You have to just sit in front of your computer like everyone else. (Unless you are a super-genius/nerd and already have your computer hooked up to your TV—in which case, your lucky self can watch them on your big screen. But first you need to come to my house and hook me up with some of that.)
I was so excited to start my Met Player experience that I pretty much just clicked on the first thing I saw—a recent HD opera. It started promisingly enough. A little choppiness as the video began, but that’s to be expected as things start downloading. Unfortunately, the choppiness continued.
I came to the natural assumption that I had too many programs open on my desktop, so I started closing them. Tweetdeck seemed like the most likely culprit—it’s always crashing, or at least slowing things down. OK, I could stand not getting my Twitter mentions for a few minutes.
I went back to Met Player. Still just as bad.
So I cleaned up the rest of my toolbar—closed my FTP uploader, Microsoft Word, iChat, and my address book. (iTunes was the first to get “force quitted.” That thing is always so slow! What, just because I have 23 days’ worth of music?) I also disconnected my external hard drive, which can suck a lot of power when it gets up and running.
Again back to Met Player. Again still having problems. At this point, I started wondering if the problem was not enough memory or something like that. So I found the tech specs on the site’s FAQ and discovered my problem. To view a normal-def video, all I needed was 128 MB of RAM, but to view a high-def video, I needed 1 GB—twice what I actually had. There’s no way to downgrade the videos from high def to normal def (no, that is not a technical term), so I was stuck with just the old television broadcasts to play with.
No problem. I wasn’t about to turn my nose up at Leontyne Price’s Aida. I would have liked to have seen Juan Diego Flórez’s Almaviva, but there were still plenty of goodies to choose from.
I selected a non-HD video and clicked Play. It started out better than the last, but it was still too choppy to be enjoyable. It was probably 75 percent less choppy than the HD, but it was still irritating.
I went back to the tech specs to verify I filled all the requirements for non-HD viewing. There was even a link to a test I could take to test my connection speed, and it was given an excellent rating. (If it were a competition, I would have been a runner-up.)
Still thinking the problem must be me, I decided it was probably time to go through old files on my computer anyway, to delete what I could do away with and free up some memory. I took my whole night off to go through documents, photos, MP3s, videos, and even applications to weed out what I could delete.
After hours of sorting and many rounds of emptying the Trash, I came back to Met Player and selected a video. It was better, but still choppy. I made an attempt to sit through the opera, but the connection ended up grating on my nerves so badly that I aborted after the third aria—and this was after discovering that I had much better luck on Safari than Firefox for some reason.
I also couldn’t get the subtitles to turn on. Maybe if I’d spent a chunk of time on it, I would have figured out I was looking in the wrong place. I’m the Tech-Savvy Singer, however, and I’m not a novice at this stuff. I should be able to turn on the subtitles after reading the instructions the first three times. Either they weren’t working or it’s so nonintuitive that it just wasn’t worth my time. (I know the words already, anyway, so there!) Better luck to you.
Well, Netflix wouldn’t let me so much as attempt to view an online movie without 1 GB of RAM. Met Player told me it was possible and even let me catch a glimpse—but the reality didn’t live up to the dream. So I guess I’ll keep Netflix for now.
But don’t let my out-of-date laptop keep you from this potential treasure trove. You can find out for yourself if your computer is up to Met Player speed. Just go to www.metplayer.org. Not only can you sign up for a free seven-day trial, you can also test a few sample videos first to see how your CPU handles them. If you can view them all right, or if they might be a little choppy but that doesn’t bother you, I say go for it. The opportunity to see and hear these historic (and many otherwise unavailable) live performances is too much to pass up. It might even be worth buying a new computer over.
On that note, if any of our fine readers would like to gift me a brand new MacBook Air, see my contact info below. In the meantime, I’m going to stick to Netflix (with the occasional visit to YouTube) until the day when my system can handle what the Met has to offer. They’ll probably have a lot more operas online by then, anyway!
