In this week’s podcast, Alyssa and Grace interview Christian Cox, Director of Marketing and Communications for the Pittsburgh Opera and David Dombrosky, Chief Marketing Officer at Instant Encore to discuss the recent launch of the Pittsburgh Opera Mobile App. Listen below to learn about their process developing the app and its many features and benefits. To continue exploring how technology can be used in opera, read the post on the Future of Technology in Opera.
[Musical Introduction]
Alyssa: Hello, listeners, and welcome to an interview episode with the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Alyssa and I am the Podcast Producer. In this episode, Grace Puckett and I sit down with Christian Cox, Director of Marketing and Communications for the Pittsburgh Opera, and David Dombrosky, Chief Marketing Officer at Instant Encore. We'll talk about the development, release, and the many features of the Pittsburgh Opera Mobile App. We hope you enjoy this interview brought to you by AMT Lab.
[musical interlude]
Alyssa: We are here with Chris Cox of the Pittsburgh Opera and David Dombrosky of Instant Encore to talk about the Pittsburgh Opera app. So, gentlemen, could you take a moment to introduce yourselves for our listeners?
Chris Cox: Sure. Hi there. My name is Chris Cox. I'm Director of Marketing and Communications for Pittsburgh Opera.
David Dombrosky: And I'm David Dombrosky, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer for Instant Encore.
Alyssa: Alright, perfect. So, before we get started today, I actually need to throw in a quick little disclaimer. I actually interned with the Pittsburgh Opera for the 18-19 season.
Chris: You sure did.
Alyssa: I did. That was with the development team and while I did not help out with this particular app, I was around for some of the beta tests that were taking place, and I was there during the app’s official release this past spring. So, David, it's very good to meet you, but Chris is great to see you again.
Chris: Thanks for having me back.
David: It’s good to meet you.
Alyssa: Alright, coolness.
Grace Puckett: So, the Pittsburgh Opera app is an app designed to enhance the performance process from start to finish. One of its most prominent features is providing program notes in real time during performances, but the app also includes a calendar of events, video clips, photos, artists bios, links to social media, ways to purchase tickets, and a feature to donate to the Opera. What-, when thinking about this, what encouraged you to develop an app for the opera? Can you talk a little bit about that process within the development of coming, you know, having this app come to fruition?
Chris: Sure. So, I came to Pittsburgh Opera about four years ago and at that time, because we didn't have a mobile app at all, and there was discussion of, you know, do we need one or not, you know, we adjust. We launched a website that was mobile friendly, using responsive design, and people could access most of the content you're referring to, through their smartphones already - Did we need an app as well?
Grace: Right.
Chris: And my belief was that an app would be beneficial, right. There are certain things you can do in an app, there's certain things that makes easier than a mobile website. Things like push notifications, for example. And the challenge really was finding the right app solution. I'd worked at a software digital marketing company for six years where we made apps and I knew firsthand how labor intensive and expensive it can be to create your own app from scratch, and then maintain it and so forth. So, really what I was searching for was a platform that had a lot of these features and bells and whistles baked in already, that we could simply license and install and set up and manage, you know, without having to worry about the back end development and, and creation. And that's where I met David and the folks at Instant Encore.
David: Yeah, so our Appscension platform is actually 10 years old. We launched our first app with the platform in 2009 with the New York Philharmonic and we've powered hundreds of apps with it since then. And so that's one part of it, one piece of it, but the real time program now that you're talking about is actually an entirely separate product called LiveNote that integrates with the Appscension platform. So, you can have LiveNote independent of an app, it can be done through a web link that takes your patrons to the content as well. But when you integrate it with the app, it unlocks some additional things, we can actually take advantage of some of the native technology features we can detect. For example, with Pittsburgh Opera we can detect if someone has their headphones plugged in and if they do not then we do not allow them to hear the audio. Whereas in the web version of it, we have to prompt them differently. We actually have to say, “Do you have your headphones plugged in?” Because if they say yes, then it's going to play the audio, regardless of whether they have them in or not. So, for people who are looking at doing something with audio involved like Pittsburgh wanted to do, I do really recommend the native app version just because of that ability to take advantage of that.
Chris: And from Pittsburgh Opera’s standpoint, so we had the the, quote unquote, base version of the app, you know, for a couple years, and it was going great, you know, we're happy with it, we're updating content, we're using it, you know, we had users downloading interacting with it, etc. And that was all fine, but we were trying to think of new ways to engage our audiences, we're always looking for what-, what-, what can we do better? You know, we never want to rest on our laurels or anything like that. And someone had the idea of “boy, it'd be really neat if we could deliver some supplemental content to patrons during performances”, right. This is sort of a revolutionary idea, but in other ways, it was more of an evolutionary idea. If any opera you go to of ours, for years and years and years, you can see English supertitles projected on the stage on a screen like a PowerPoints slide basically. So, no matter what language the opera is sung in, you can sit there and read and follow along and know what the singers are saying, right?
So, in that sense, hey, that's extra from the performance itself, but it's-, it's a part of the show that everyone is used to, and most people find very helpful. We also offered and pioneered something about a 10-15 years ago, our audio commentary program, and this was geared towards patrons with visual impairments. So, you know, blind people, for example. And if they can't see what's happening on stage, right, but they can hear the music, they hear the singing, they can come to one of our performances on our-, on Tuesday, right we-, this is something that's done live in real time and is very labor intensive. We only do them for our Tuesday performances, but they can basically rent these headsets from the Benedum Center, for example, for free. And we have a person in a booth essentially narrating what's happening on stage. So, you can say “oh, you know, this person just picked up a knife”, you know, or “Oh, this person opened the door”, whatever, so that the patron besides hearing the, the singing and the music, can have a sense of what's happening on stage as well, right? So that's okay, they're using a supplemental device in the theater to enhance their experience. So, this, we want to sort of build on those concepts and provide people with ways to essentially get color commentary about the show. And the way that we end up doing it was with this LiveNote module within the app we already had, right? So, from our patron standpoint, or user standpoint, it's still Pittsburgh Opera’s mobile app i-, now it can just do some extra things that it couldn't before. Right? So that user simplicity was very, very important to us.
Grace: And that then negated the necessity of any patrons coming in and having to download a new app, which is-
Chris: Correct.
Grace: I know that sometimes that's a barrier to getting people to use these kinds of technology when you're rolling them out, because they're like, “Oh, well I just downloaded one like a month ago. Why do I have to do another one”, right?
David: Exactly.
Grace: Okay, and I'm just curious too, when you're saying additional to what is already offered, does that include – and forgive me, I don't know if Pittsburgh Opera does this, I assume it does but I like to ask – does, is there included some sort of like story line within a program? Is that something that Pittsburgh Opera does? I know that's something that some organizations do, but I don't know how paper heavy you guys are.
Chris: So we have a really printed program book, you know, for all of our performances, and the ushers will give those out to the patrons as they're going to their seats. We take a PDF of that program book, printed program book, and we upload it to our website and to our mobile app.
Grace: Okay, so it's integrated in, even if they are printed in hard copy.
Chris: Correct, correct. Exactly, some people have been, let's say, we run out, you know, we have more people than expected-
Grace: Right!
Chris: And we that-, anyone could get the program through the mobile app or through our website, if they chose to.
David: Well, and I think it's important to note that the content you do through LiveNote is not the same kind that appears in the wri-, in the written program.
Chris: Exactly.
David: And I think people probably might confuse that they might say, “well, why are you doing program notes and an app, I can just read them in the book?” because it's totally different. You're, they're actually leveraging the context of the performance moment to talk about what's going on right now and give commentary on what's going on specifically at this moment. And that's an entirely different experience than sitting down, reading program notes in advance, and trying to recollect everything you just read at different moments during the performance. It's different.
Chris: So, for our season opening opera this fall was Mozart's Don Giovanni. And the production that we did was a-, we called it a film noir production, where the sets, the costumes, the lighting, everything was very inspired by classic film noir movies. And we had the stage director Kristine McIntyre, who was the creator, the inventor of this particular production. We had her pre-record little audio tidbits about different scenes and during the performance, if you had the app up, when we got to a certain part of the opera, you would hear Kristine, if you had your ear bud in, pipe up with, “Oh, see this right here, this was inspired by this such and such movie”, you know, with this character, and so on. Right? And “oh, there's Donna Elvira, the outfit she's wearing was, you know, inspired by the character so and so in the 1940 classic blah, blah”, right. So, it was literally like having the director sitting in the seat next to you whispering in your ear, you know, about this behind the scenes stuff. Right. It was really, really cool.
Grace: No, that sounds amazing. It sounds like with the app, you know, versus the paper – paper, you're kind of given an overview, it's very, I don't want to say generic, but it's a very simple thing. Whereas with the app, you're able to kind of get into the mind of those who are involved and get into a little bit of that stuff you're not necessarily able to do in the program, because if you did that in the program would probably be much larger than it already is to begin with.
Chris: Well, and as David said, the, the app content is delivered in real time. So, the content is created advance, created in advance, and it is uploaded into the CMS in advance. But we have a live person in a booth in the theater with her laptop up there with the CMS open, and she is hitting ‘next’, ‘next’, ‘next’, at certain cues. She follows along on the musical score, right. And when she gets to certain measures in the score, then boom, she hits the Next button and on your app in real time, poof, up comes this content. So, it is literally of the moment, right, and she is very, very careful to deliver to the appropriate times because no one wants someone yapping in your ear at the you know that-, during a wonderful solo, where the singer is pouring her heart and soul out and telling the character how much she loves him, and you know, you-, we don't want to interrupt that. Right. So, the content is delivered during lulls, right, during changes in the set or things like that. When it is, when it is not disruptive.
Daivd: And I think that's what makes it work because I think most people probably in the opera industry, when they heard that you were doing this, were like, “That's insane. What are you doing? You're giving them audio content while people are actually delivering audio from the stage. What are you doing?”
Alyssa: I was wondering about that.
David: And so of course, it sounds counterintuitive, you know, exponentially, but what's really interesting is how Mia at Pittsburgh Opera, one, she creates the commentary notes, and then two, she is there deciding, all right, this is the right lull. Now, you know, because yeah, you get to a measure number, but sometimes things can be happening on stage that are out of sync with what you think they would be.
Chris: Not at our performances. [laughter]
David: But no, Mia talks about it though, like when she goes into a dress rehearsal, and she goes back and edits because she's like, “okay, that needs to be moved, that comment needs to be moved to a different place because of what's happening on stage at that moment”.
Chris: Our artistic staff tests the app at our, at our rehearsals and gives me this feedback about “Oh, you know what, like, this was a little bit too long and it started a little too late or you need to wait a little bit longer before you do this one” for those exact reasons. So there's a lot of testing and learning and trial and error that happens during the rehearsal process, so that when the performance is actually happened and can run smoothly. And you know building on what David said in terms of it sounds counterintuitive, you know, to be doing this, I'm gonna make the analogy of while you're watching the baseball game on TV, you know, and the commentators are quiet in the middle of the-, of a base hit, right? But then “Okay, are the players on base now?” They start talking and as “Oh, yeah, well, he got that fastball, got hit with-, the opposite way”. And, you know, they wait until there's a lull to say that sort of stuff and it can enhance your enjoyment of the ball game. And this is meant to do something very similar.
Alyssa: Yeah, I really like everything that you described so far with the app and its development, not only in the way that enhances the performance in so many different ways, but also how inclusive it is, as well, for not only those who have disabilities, but for those that are very new to opera and want to learn more information about how everything connects, and why the singer may, may approach an aria a certain way or why the stage is set up the way it is. So that's really cool.
Chris: Mia goes, is very careful to think about different kinds of audience members as she prepares the content. You know, we want to always attract new operagoers – audience development is important for us and for every arts organization out there, right. We're always hoping to grow our audience base and introduce new people to our art form in our productions and performances. We know that opera as a genre, you know, suffers from some negative stereotypes and misconceptions, misperceptions about what it is that typically boils down to, “oh, it's not for me”.Right. And-
David: Yeah, I call that a perceptual barrier.
Chris: It is 100% perceptual barrier, yeah.
David: And there are a lot of art forms that have that, you know, where people are like, “Yeah, but it's not for me”. And I think this is a really great tool for knocking down that perceptual barrier because the people who have that perceptual barrier, who are actually sitting in your audience, are usually the plus ones, right? You know, either their spouse or their girlfriend or boyfriend drag them to the show, or they're, you know, appeasing one of their friends and tagging along. And this is a great opportunity to turn that, you know, tentative plus one into, “okay, I need to come back and see more of this”.
Chris: Absolutely. And we want to be able to make people feel comfortable with the show that they’ll understand what's happening and they won't feel like they're lost, right? So hey, there's some extra content that gives me some background and perspective and explains terms that I might not be familiar with. All these things are making me feel comfortable and tell them they understand that this really isn't that scary after all, this is actually pretty neat and pretty fun. You know, I'm glad that I learned this, I learned, I learned that.
Alyssa: Can you tell us how much time it takes to maintain or update the app for a new performance?
Chris: So, I'll answer that question two different ways. We have general content updates for the app that are separate from the LiveNote performance aspects of it, right. And those are generally pretty, pretty minimal. You know, we enter all of our events before the season starts, you know, we enter headshots and bios for artists, those kinds of things that you know, once it's set, it's pretty much set for the season. So, that's not that labor intensive, you know, you need to be conscientious about it, but it's not overweight, you know, time consuming. In terms of creating the, the live performance experience, that takes a considerable amount of time and effort among a whole broad range of folks at, at, at the opera, Not just Mia Bonnewell who writes the content, much of the content for us, but people from the production department, right. Oftentimes, guest artists like I mentioned the director Kristine McIntyre, right, it was very [inaudible] for her to prepare this content for us, then Mia has to enter it all into the CMS. And then as I mentioned, we do testing, we do dry runs at our rehearsals, right, just to get the timings right, and tinker with things and so forth. So, it is something that we've, you know, we knew it would be…, we knew that to do it right would take some commitment, right, some, some, some time and some effort. And we were very fortunate that we got some grants, both from Opera America as well as from the Hillman Foundation, that allowed us to, you know, hire someone like Mia to prepare this stuff, right and, and support some of the staff time and so forth that was required to get this right for the first performances. So it is, it's about as much work as you would expect it to be, right? Like it, meaning it's a considerable amount of work, but it needs to be in order to get it right.
David: And I would say probably anyone, any of our clients who are using LiveNote, for the live performance aspect of it, would tell you that the creation of the content is the most labor intensive part of it. And, you know, that's because you're trying to determine what are the key pieces of information that are really going to bring a different level of understanding to this contextual moment, you know, and trying to determine your pacing as well. You don't want to front load everything. You don't want to have everything, you know, being said within a three-minute period. You know, you need to figure out how do I space this out, and so a lot of it is just not, not just identifying the content, but then figuring out what's the proper pacing for delivery. And that's when you're talking about commentary. We have other folks who are using LiveNote for delivering translations, or you know, and so you can get the say the libretto in multiple languages. Or we have others who actually have-, [laughter]
I love, there's-, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra out of Houston. One of the things I love about them is all of their notes are written by one of their musicians. And I'm going to give a shout out to Matt, who is their principal percussionist. He's cheeky, and I love it, because anyone who's following Matt's commentary is going to have an entirely different flavor of the performance than somebody sitting down the aisle from them who's not. You're going to have entirely different experiences of the production.
Alyssa: Interesting. So, maybe it takes a special skill set to deliver these or write these notes, or maybe there's more creative aspects to it?
David: Um, we actually had-, so, LiveNote was created by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Origin goes all the way back to 2011, a professor from Drexel University took a number of students to their first orchestral performance, which was with Philadelphia Orchestra, and when he was talking with them afterwards, he realized they were lost. They had no frame of reference for the music that they were hearing. They were entirely unfamiliar with it. They didn't know where their eye should be looking on the stage at any given moment, which instruments are playing. They walked out feeling like they just had a… meh kind of experience. And so, he took that information that [inaudible] and they really sat with it and they were like, “Okay, so how can we help people who are new to an art form, or new to a particular work, how can we help bring them closer to the work? Maybe not as close as somebody who's heard it or seen it 10 times, 15 times, 20 times in their life. But how can we bring them closer to it than somebody who's coming in cold, knowing nothing?” And so, they worked together and in 2014, they launched the first version of LiveNote and it was a standalone mobile app at the time. And Instant Encore, we were powering a Philadelphia Orchestra mobile app. So, they actually, at that time, did have people downloading two different apps. And in 20-, you know, in 2017, we started talking with them, why don't we bring your live note content into your Philadelphia Orchestra app? Keep it all branded, one app, they don't have to download two. They thought that was a great idea and they were very generous and said why don't you make LiveNote available to anyone who has an app at that time. And that's how it became possible for Pittsburgh Opera at that point. And so, we launched version two of LiveNote in August of 2018.
So yeah, people are using it in different ways. In Philadelphia, they actually have provided us a number of tips that we have on our website of how do you write content for presentation during a live performance in a way that's not distracting? And so, they talk about it and a lot of it is-, one of the things is going away from some of the issues that have taken place with written program notes over the years, where they've taken a more formalized tone or almost an academic feel to them, stripping that away and being conversational. Stripping it away and still being able to be informative, still be able to introduce new concepts to people, but to talk about it in a way, that's much more casual in your vocabulary in your everyday ways of speaking.
Chris: It's intended to be approachable, right. Yeah, we for our newer patrons, we want them to feel very comfortable and feel like this is an approachable art form for them and it's important that the app conveys that as well.
Grace: So on that note, since we know that the app is designed to cater to all of these kinds of audiences, both new and familiar to opera, um, thinking of how the LiveNote aspect of this app is designed to enhance the overall experience by giving these additional program notes, additional knowledge, getting in the mind of the director… With those who may be wary of this app and just having this technology in this space because they're afraid it may detract from their experience, whether it's because they have a device out, or they see someone else having that device out, um, what is your kind of response to those who may be afraid of this, the notion of having a technology in a space that has traditionally been considered by many to not have technology involved, even though we know it does, but in terms of like from the audience perspective forward.
Chris: We have gone out of our way, working with the folks at Instant Encore to make sure that there is minimal to no disruption to nearby patrons by those who use the app. The two kinds of disruption that patrons might fear when they hear of the idea of the app, before they knew anything about it, he first two things they worry about are this: the noise is going to bother me or the light is going to bother me. So, there are things, we have safeguards that we've collaborated on to put in place to, to protect against each of those. From a noise standpoint. as David mentioned earlier, the audio content only gets delivered if you have earphones plugged in, or you know earbuds and Bluetooth and so forth. So, we've tested this over and over and over, right, have it in your earbuds in great. Yank it out of your phone, can't hear it anymore. So, there is really no risk of noise seepage, uh, for spilling over to the patrons sitting next to you, right. Or if you are a patron and the person next to you is using the app, you're not going to hear what they're hearing. So, that-, and we tested that all last season and we're very comfortable that the noise is not going to be an issue for folks.
In terms of light seepage, there were several different things that install core and we worked on together to minimize that as well. Basically, it's on a dark screen, we use purple text on a black background, right, and David and his team built in some controls into the CMS where we can literally adjust the brightness settings for the app experience so that if your phone is on a setting of 80 out of 100 brightness, for example, but we want our app experience at 30… when you use the app, even though your phone set to 80 is going to show up at 30. Right. And therefore, the light seepage is minimal. As part of our rehearsal testing process, we make sure that the slides, whether there's this text, you know, or a photo, that they are up for just long enough for people to be able to read it and see it and then we go to a blank slide, meaning a black background, right. So, we don't leave a photo of something up there for six minutes before the next cue might happen to come up. So, it's in, its out, right. And we did a lot of testing in the theaters of all the last season to see “Oh, how much, how noticeable is it right?” And it really is not very noticeable, like you have to go looking for it to see that it's there.
David: I was really surprised with the diminish factor because, uh, before the audience would decide what dimness level you know, they would access the control panel in LiveNote and take the dimness to whatever level they needed. But it wasn't being set as a default by the organization, so that's something we did build in for the season. And what I find really interesting is like, with something like Don Pasquale or even a Don Giovanni where the palettes darker, that you can take the dimness down to like 10% and it's still incredibly legible in a darkened theater, you know. But it does drastically reduce the light pollution, the ambient light. The other thing is the Do Not Disturb prompt. So, we added this as well where you can, with the flip of the switch you can, in the CMS, it will prompt the user to put their phone into Do Not Disturb. And that way, it keeps things from like their notifications for, you know, their text messages, notifications, it puts all of that on hold until the end of the performance.
Alyssa: Alright, cool. So, this is a lot of great information that you're providing us with today. I'm curious, is there one thing you wish you knew about the development process before you started?
David: I'm going to let Chris answer that. [laughter]
Chris: The short answer is not really. You know, we understood going into this, that there'll be a lot of experimentation needed and that, you know, we would sort of learn by doing and, I don't want to say trial and error, but you know, we knew that there'd be a lot of experimentation required. And that was why we took the time to spend an entire season, testing this very discreetly, before we finally rolled it out to people, you know, for real. So, we, we built in a lot of time, a lot of resources and effort into learning the best way to roll this out so that it would simultaneously add value to patrons who choose to use it, while not disrupting patrons who weren't using it. So, we knew that it was going to be a lengthy process and we were prepared for that. So, there was weren't any hidden gotchas that we thought, “Oh, my God, like, whoa, if only we'd done this beforehand, then things would have turned out better”. But it-, this turned out pretty well, and that's because we were able to be deliberate and partner with the folks at Instant Encore on all of these features and functionality.
David: I will say that that's something that you did, very smartly that many arts managers when they're adopting new technology, do not do and that give yourself time to experiment. Give yourself time to find out what's not working, before you turn it into a pivotal part of what you do. [laughter] And, and you know, for a lot of us what happens is we decide we need to do something, address a certain issue or challenge, and we find a technology solution that will help us do that. And then we, we just anticipate it's going to be perfect out of the box and these are tools. No tool is going to be perfect out of the box. It's all in how you use it and how you adapt it to what you do. And I think that's something that a lot of arts managers could really learned from is building in the time to experiment with the technology before you take it live and make it a pivotal part of what you're doing.
Chris: And then for example, the original LiveNote didn't have the audio capabilities.
David: Right.
Chris: Right. That was something that we added through this grant from Opera America and the fall of our 2018 - 2019 season, the first two performances, we did testing where there-, the audio wasn't done yet, right? There was no audio. David's team was creating that capability. And we said, “You know what, in the meantime, why don't we at least get the block and tackle down here? Why don't we at least, you know, acclimate ourselves and get comfortable using the base product so that then when the audio capability gets rolled out next, always it was more in that one extra part rather than starting from scratch”. Right. So yeah, so we definitely want to take our time with that.
Grace: So on that note, I mean, you sort of answered the next question that I have, so I guess I'm going to ask if you can maybe bring in a couple other things-. Outside of the time that it takes to really go into app development and making sure that it fits your organization's needs, um, what might you recommend to arts managers or organizations who want to develop a similar kind of app?
David: Well… Alright, so if you wanted to if you want to deliver content in real time, during a live event or performance, the thing I would tell you is make sure you have a game plan for how you introduce it to your audience because you're introducing change. You're introducing change into a space they thought they knew and so when you're introducing that kind of change, they're relying on you to set the tone. You know, and to like-, so a great example, like during the testing-. Oh my god, there was that one time where at La Boheme where I was sitting down the aisle from you and Emily and the Usher came up and told you to turn off your phones! [laughter] And this was during testing, right? So, you know, there hadn't been an announcement from the stage letting everyone in the theater know this was okay. So this one was like, “Sir, you need to turn off your phone”. [laughter]
Chris: Well, the funny thing was, I had actually given this talk to all the ushers” before the doors opened and said, by the way, we're going to have some folks testing this app sitting over there, it's okay”. And I think she just might have not been paying attention to that part of my speech.
David: Yeah, she might not have heard that. But, um, but it's different now because now you've got, you know, Christopher, you know, who will say this is happening and this is okay. And that makes the audience feel like, “Oh, okay”.
Alyssa: And when you mention Christopher, you’re referring to the General Director of The Pittsburgh Opera that’s going up on stage and making this announcement and letting the audience know that, “hey, this is taking place and that it's a change and here’s what to expect”.
David: Yeah, and I think when you set the tone, that way, then that mitigates anything like dealing with another audience member who's irritated because you have your phone out. You don't have that because they've already been told it's okay. And so you just have to think through that kind of strategy, when you're introducing something new into, an, you know, experiential environment like that.
Chris: There was definitely a vocal minority who were vehemently opposed to the very notion of this, this experience, right? They were very, very, you know, upset by the thought that we were going to do this and tried to talk us out of it and make us change our mind and not go through with it and so forth. So, you know, for other arts organizations out there who are considering this, I say, be prepared for that sort of, you know, fear, but, you know, we pushed ahead anyway. And the-, we've now had eight public performances, you know, across two productions this fall under our belts and there was a sum total of one person who actually complained about someone near them using the app and somehow the person, the person using the app was behind the person who complained and somehow they, they still were upset by it. But this is out of thousands and thousands of patrons over the course of eight different performances.
The fear that this is going to somehow you know, incite mass chaos, you know, did not come to pass and the other thing I would say is, you know, this is a, it's a great tool. We're very excited about it, we're continuing to use it you know, all season in the future but all you know, manage your own expectations. It's not like a silver bullet, it's not like all of a sudden you know, we're selling out every performance when because this this app now exists. It's you know, one arrow in the quiver, so to speak, and our usage rates if to these first day performances are anywhere from between three to six-ish percent. And that is in line, actually above what research has shown museum app experiences, you know, are used at. So, it's a very positive first step, but don't expect everyone in the theater to be using this. And in a way, that's probably a good thing because we like it to be sort of introduced a little more gradually and then the people who are worried about it, all of a sudden they realize, “Oh, yeah, you know what, I, that didn't bug me at all. I didn't, I didn't even know that was happening”, you know, and then “oh, I didn't know it, didn’t know it, didn’t know it”. And then all of a sudden, they're used to it being a part of the experience, right? So, in a way, you know, the sort of slow build is probably for everyone's benefit.
David: I liked, though, how you actually, you invited one of those very vocal, vehement detractors to come and experience it, Because they were just, they were very vocal about the concept without ever having seen it in the real world, you know, and you guys are smart. You invited them and said, “You know what, why don't you come in and experience it and you tell us, if it's distracting”.
Alyssa: Oh that’s that's brilliant.
David: And… Yeah, no, that was really smart, because it turned him around on it.
Chris: Tha-, wha, we've essentially offered, you know, free tickets to, you know, “Oh, you know, I don't, I don't like the idea of this, you know, I'm afraid it would just be a distraction and take my eyes off the stage or whatever is it”. Tell you what, that's fine. Come enjoy the performance the way you normally would. If you would like to come back and see the performance a second time, just so you can try it with the app, let us know, we'll be happy to take care of that for you. Right. A few people took us up on the offer. But yeah, well, another thing I’ll mention, we talked a lot about trying to use this to ease in opera neophytes into the art form – there's actually a lot of content that is for the aficionados of the content source as well. One of the folks that we invited to come test with us for La Boheme, you know, he'd seen La Boheme he said, like 14 times. Like so many he’d lost count of how often he’d seen La Boheme over the years. [shocked laughter] In different cities, in different productions, in different countries and so forth. Um, and he's with us at the end of the rehearsal, he said “wow, you know, I learned so much about this production, about this opera that I never knew before, thanks to this app. This was really interesting”. Right? So yeah, there's a lot of content for the aficionados as well as for the neophytes. Grace: Interesting. Cool.
Alyssa: All right. Well, David, Chris, thank you so much for joining us today for this interview. This has been a lot of fun and we learned a great deal from you guys. So, thank you so much.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely.
Grace: I might actually make my way over to the opera and use the app cause I have not been yet!
Chris: We certainly hope so!
Alyssa: Alrighty.
Grace: Thank you, gentlemen.
Alyssa: So, for our listeners, if you would like to read more regarding Instant Encore and their app development, you can check out their website at instantencore.com. Additionally, Instant Encore has a blog on their website regarding apps specifically for opera and this blog can be found at blog.instantencore.instantencore/tag/opera.
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Thanks for listening to the Arts Management and Technology Lab podcast series. You can read more on the intersection between the Arts and Technology at www.amt-lab.org. Or, you can listen to more interviews and discussions in our podcast series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.
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