Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb said in an interview with Reuters that at the beginning of the company's live-to-cinema opera transmissions seven years ago, many doubted the venture: "I think there were a lot of people who expected us to fall on our face with this program," Gelb said.
But now, with about 3 million viewers seeing about a dozen Met opera HD casts in movie theaters in 64 countries, it's a big success, even if not a fiscal windfall. Each broadcast costs about $1 million to produce, and according to Gelb the expected "modest profit" has been "exceeded significantly." About the age of audiences, Gelb said:
When I took over the Met [in 2006], the average age of our audience was 65. We managed to reverse that trend. The average is a few years younger; I think it is 59 or 61. Certainly, high definition is part of that. We’ve stopped the increasingly elderly attendance.