The classical music industry is now providing a profusion of on-demand videos which you can watch over the Internet, many at very high audio quality. We’ve been featuring the Metropolitan Opera’s Met Opera on Demand and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall for some while now; these have been joined by free offerings from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. We expect many more to follow. There are also various Internet TV channels dedicated to classical music, and even a look around YouTube will show some quality classical music: for example, the Royal Academy of Music’s YouTube channel shows free streams of its students’ concerts, often conducted by big names.
Getting the right setup, however, can be tricky. It’s a bit like car ownership 50 years ago: the equipment was readily available and broadly affordable, but you needed a fair degree of knowledge about car mechanics. The quality of high definition (HD) picture and excellent sound means that you can get an exceptional concert-going experience in your living room – but there isn’t a “plug in and go” solution. Different people have different needs and wants, depending on budgets, numbers and sizes of rooms, mobility and what computing and audio/visual equipment they own.
First, get the right broadband
Be aware that HD video uses a lot of Internet bandwidth, so make sure you have a good enough Internet connection. The Berlin Phil and the Met both specify a minimum of 2 Mbps, but that’s a bare minumum: Berlin’s recommendation of 6 Mbps is the lowest you should go for.
Check out the real speed of your connection using one of the many available speed testers (I use speedtest.net, largely because I can remember the URL), and don’t be surprised if the speed comes out at half or less of what your provider advertised: their small print tends to allow them to get away with announcing numbers that are far higher than you see in practice. So to get 6 Mbps of real bandwidth, you’re likely to need a product rated at well over 12 Mbps. If you are sharing your connection over WiFi with roommates or kids, remember that they’re using bandwidth also: your 12 Mbps can be rapidly consumed by a couple of teenagers watching YouTube while exchanging music files. Multi-player online games (of the World of Warcaft variety) will also consume much bandwidth.
Make sure you test at different times of day, because your real broadband speed will vary, differently for different locations. In the UK, networks in residential areas are busy in the evenings. I’m told that it's the opposite in Eastern Europe, where a lot of Internet traffic comes from offices, so that daytimes are more congested.
The simple option – watching on your computer
Once you have a viable broadband setup, the simplest way of accessing on-demand video is by playing it on your computer (or iPad or other tablet – this article will use the word “device” to mean “whichever box is streaming the video"). All the major platforms have websites that work in most browsers, and if they use Flash (which doesn’t work on iPads), they usually have separate iPad apps.
By the way, if you’re watching catch-up TV or video on demand on your tablet, you’re part of a rising trend: the UK Ofcom’s 2013 report reckons that tablet ownership doubled in the preceding year, half of owners say they now couldn’t live without their tablet, and the share of video on demand requests from tablets quadrupled. And it’s not just the UK: Gothenburg Symphony’s Måns Pär Fogelberg reckons that over 60% of GSOPlay’s views come from tablets.
The video quality on most modern laptops and tablets is perfectly adequate for single user viewing, although screen sizes are small and viewing angles may be limited. The generally poor quality of built-in speakers can be overcome with little effort by plugging in a decent pair of headphones. But if you want a bigger picture or bigger and better sound, you’ll need to do more.
Hooking up to a TV
For most people, that “bigger screen” will be an existing wide screen TV in your living room. If it’s been bought later than around 2006, it’s extremely likely that it will have an HDMI input. If you have a modern laptop or tablet, it almost certainly has an HDMI output or an output for which you can buy an adapter. So buy the right HDMI cable, plug your device into the TV, figure out how to select the right HDMI input (which can, admittedly, be harder than it sounds) and you’re all set.
The snag of this approach is that the TV is probably at the other end of the room from your sofa, so you have to walk across the room to select what you’re watching, hit the pause button, etc. Wireless IR keyboards and mice don’t have enough range to reach the far end of most living rooms; Bluetooth keyboards and mice do, but you may still struggle to read small print on the screen.
If you’re in the Apple world, there’s a neat and not overly expensive solution to this called AppleTV. It’s a small £99 box ($99 in the US) which connects to the Internet and (via HDMI) to your TV. An Apple system called Airplay allows you to sit on your sofa with your iPad, iPhone or Macbook while the video streams through WiFi and the AppleTV box onto your TV. Robert Taussig, who has been installing high end a/vsystems in London for decades, now uses AppleTV as his standard solution for people who want to view Internet a/v material on their living room TV.
If you have an Android phone or tablet, Google has a product called Chromecast: a small “dongle” that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port and connects to your phone by WiFi, allowing you to stream your Android phone/tablet’s content to your TV in much the same way as Apple TV/Airplay. It’s a $35 device in the US and has been doing well; plans for a European release have not yet been announced.
According to US consultant Fred Ampel, high end installers there disagree: several strongly advised staying away from WiFi on grounds of transmission reliability, preferring a good wired connection. The same installers recommended staying away from Apple on grounds of audio quality.
Smart TVs and other boxes
If you don’t want to keep a computer in your living room, there’s a bewildering variety of available alternatives: it seems that the cost of a/v streaming hardware has become so low that manufacturers have been tempted to include it in many different sorts of box – whether or not it’s an obvious fit from the user’s viewpoint. The Berliner Philharmoniker have invested heavily in making sure that the Digital Concert Hall is available on a wide range of platforms: their director of online development Alexander McWilliam considers that a computer is “just about the worst device” to consume on-demand media.