When staging company PRG launched its video division in September, it had an interesting impetus: Broadway and Wall Street. Tim Wiley, who is heading up PRG Video out of the company’s Orlando office, cited both domains as driving the addition of a video division, giving PRG capability across the entertainment technology spectrum that also includes lighting and sound. And he’s got company on this convergent road, as he readily acknowledges — OSA International did the same at right about the same time, just a few months after adding their own lighting capability to augment their core audio services. Others are doing the same.
“I think Broadway and the increasing sophistication of ‘corporate theatre’ has a lot to do with staging companies increasing the range of their services,” says Wiley, who previously worked at LMG. “There’s more demand for better media in both of those arenas. Corporate theatre has been growing since the 1980s, and it’s really reaching a peak lately, and more Broadway shows, like Lestat, which we worked on, are incorporating video elements into their staging and scenery. When you see that kind of activity taking place, it’s hard not to show interest.”
PRG did show its interest, with an initial investment that Wiley loosely estimates as “a couple of million” dollars, capitalizing the acquisition of technology, including the Snell & Wilcox Kahuna switching system; Di-VentiX high-resolution switcher; Grass Valley LDK cameras; Panasonic PT-7700U, Digital Projection, Inc., 12000DSX, 35 HD and 22K 40HD video projectors; and the new Element Labs VersaTube HD.
Paul Driggs, vice president at OSA International, which also added video and lighting capability this year, and which added an integrated solutions division about 18 months ago to leverage the burgeoning installed media sector, says technology companies can’t operate in one or two dimensions anymore. He states further that audio-only companies might be at the greatest risk. “The one-stop shops are giving the audio away,” he says. “It’s package pricing — they’ll sell video at rack rate and discount the audio. So companies have to expand so they have a leveraged package to price.” (The psychology of the trend is evident in the subtle but clear shift in emphasis in the name of the company, which started as Onstage Audio, towards the less-definitive OSA International.)
So the convergence isn’t driven by the technology, as it has been in, say, music recording. Rather, the broadening of the technology base by expansion of services is driven by convergences of a different sort. Broadway and Wall Street are coming together because the citizens of both have had their entertainment media expectations raised considerably. If you have an HD television at home and bump into HD in retail environments, at some point you’re going to expect to see it at the concerts and in the boardroom. It’s a media-driven culture now; some people find it hard to explain a recipe for tuna fish salad without a PowerPoint presentation. The staging companies are reacting to this cultural shift.
Companies like Live Nation and AEG are already leveraging this trend, incorporating media technologies into new venues, like the O2 arena going up in London, and retrofitting older ones. “This all suggests that the scale of live presentations is on an upward trend,” says Wiley. “Video is already a big part of that. You need video to be a player. It’s not going to be a mom-and-pop business anymore.”
Wiley also says that staging companies are going to have to create new dynamics for interfacing with the creative talent as video integrates itself further into the business. “The projection designer is joining the audio systems designer and the lighting designer as the talent we have to work with,” he says. “I think that we’re going to see a lot of those people coming in from the broadcasting side, as well as people from the large-format projection business — areas where big projected Kabuki backdrops are used and 100,000 ANSI lumens is not uncommon. It’s going to be seen mostly on large music concert tours, but it’s going to work itself into every other kind of presentation environment.”
It’s almost as though this trend had been waiting for HD to propagate itself. As Wiley points out, the scale of projections had heretofore been limited to the pixel resolution of the projectors. As soon as a viewer perceives that the pixels are creating the picture, the illusion is lost. More pixels equal better illusions.
The first project that PRG put it all together for was in October, at an event called “Pride Fight” in Las Vegas, where the company provided sound, lighting, scenery, I-Mag video projection and playback to an audience of 12,000 people. But Wiley expects that video will develop quickly as a stand-alone revenue generator, apart from sound and lighting. PRG Video has its own three-person sales staff; he says that cross-selling across the technology services palette will stimulate even more video revenue. He’s not concerned about the increased competition from other staging providers adding video. “There’s enough demand for that to go around right now,” he says.
If there’s a fly in the ointment for video, it’s a very subjective one. Some see video’s increased applications in concerts and other events as a remedy for ever-larger productions. But, says Wiley, it could also be viewed as a symptom. “The distances between the audience and the stage are growing,” he laments. “And that’s kind of sad.”
E-mail Dan at ddaley@plsn.com
