“Strategically placed cameras will scan faces at the Download Festival site in Donnington before comparing [them] with a database of custody images from across Europe. It is one of the first times it has been trialled outside, normally it is done in a controlled environment. There has been a lot of interest from other festivals and they are saying: ‘If it works, can we borrow it?’”
Category: AUDIENCE
Has Britain’s National Trust Lost Its Way In The “Visitor Experience”?
This idol now reigns supreme in the NT’s culture: the “visitor experience” of shop, café, loos, car parks and fun for all the family, banishing the dark spectre of “elitism” and making everything ever more “accessible”, has become its religion, superseding a basic respect for the integrity and dignity of what it is charged with conserving and cherishing.
Tony TV Ratings Slip Again
“The ratings for the live ceremony hosted by Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth are close to the all-time low for the Tonys, which was 6 million in 2012. Final numbers will be issued Tuesday. Among viewers ages 18 to 49, the demographic preferred by advertisers, the telecast earned a .9 rating.”
TV Execs Talk About The Difficulties Of Reaching And Keeping Audiences
“If you make a show for a certain audience, you want to make sure you get that audience,” he says, going on to explain that this is pointedly different from the old model of trying to pull in as many viewers as possible.
Caitlyn Jenner And The Duggars Aren’t Distractions From ‘Real News’, They ARE The Real News
Andrew O’Hehir: “When you observe the intense and unfeigned public response to those stories, and the symbolic media warfare they provoke, it becomes not just meaningless but dangerous to insist that such things are inherently trivial, or serve only to distract the citizenry from Serious Issues and Real News.”
How Big Is The Tony Effect? ‘Fun Home’ Quadruples Sales
“The Tony Award for best new musical … is likely to be a major turning point, allowing the production to reach new markets, and new audiences, that might have been initially put off by its searing exploration of sexuality and suicide.”
How Big Is The No-Tonys Effect? ‘The Visit’ Closes This Weekend
“The show, which began previews on March 26 and opened April 23, has been a box office disappointment but a passion project for its producers and investors, who worked for more than a decade to bring it to Broadway.”
Is Costa Rica’s Most Beloved Children’s Book A Racist Caricature?
“The book has long been compulsory reading in the Central American nation’s schools and has even given its name to various businesses, including the tourism website cocori.com. But now it is coming under scrutiny as never before. Members of Costa Rica’s black community – about 8 percent of the 4.9 million population – increasingly view it as a skewed interpretation of their identity by its white author.”
Supertitles Are Distancing Audiences From Opera, Says Critic
Fred Plotkin: “They may bring some people to the opera house but they do not necessarily bring people closer and more intimately to opera … They distance people (who are not paying attention) from the overwhelming glory that is the combination of forces – conductor, orchestra, chorus, soloists – who do the astonishing feat of performing (without amplification) some of the most magnificent music ever written.”
Supertitles Have Saved Opera, Says Dramaturg
Cori Ellison: “In a perfect world, everybody would understand every language and every singer’s diction would be perfect, and we wouldn’t need supertitles. That is never going to happen and it never has been the case. … Also, you can read the libretto of Barber of Seville until the cows come home but it’s not going to give you the same moment-to-moment comprehension as when you’re in the theater and seeing something that is so coordinated with the translation of it.”