Opera in Pay-Per-View Ring : Will This Afternoon’s Met Gala With Superstars Score a KO?

Will it be a KO for culture, a new kind of “Ring” cycle in a medium dominated so far by championship boxing?

That’s the hope of the producers of a four-hour, all-star special today that will be the first opera performance to be carried on pay-per-view television.

For $34.95 ($1 less than the price for the Evander Holyfield-George Foreman fight last April), TV viewers can see Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo appearing together for the first time on an American stage and singing with other opera stars in excerpts from “Otello,” “Rigoletto” and “Die Fledermaus.”

The event (which can still be ordered today, if you are a cable-TV subscriber and if your cable system is equipped with the pay-per-view technology) will be carried live from 4 to 8 p.m. Pacific time, with a taped rebroadcast from 8 p.m. to midnight.

With such TV touches for the uninitiated as “color commentary” by Tom Brokaw, backstage interviews by Katie Couric and celebrity guests in the “Fledermaus” party scene, co-producer NBC and its partners--Cablevision Systems and Polygram Holdings Inc.--are hoping that at least 40,000 people nationwide will buy a TV ticket for the opera gala.

That would be only about one in every 450 homes that is equipped to receive pay-per-view. Neither the producers nor Met officials would disclose the economics of the production, but they maintained that 40,000 subscribers would generate $1.4 million in revenue and would meet their projected “break-even” figure for pay-per-view income. This would not cover all costs, they said, but they anticipate additional revenue through ancillary sales, such as home video, foreign rights and corporate underwriting for a possible PBS telecast.

The pay-per-view universe--now numbering about 18 million households--so far has not been hospitable to music programming. In fact, according to sources in the pay-per-view industry, with the possible exception of a 1989 Rolling Stones concert and James Brown’s recent comeback concert, even the most successful rock concerts on pay-per-view have not been profitable for the promoters after the performers were paid and cable companies took their share of the revenue (usually 50%).

One problem has been that young hard-rock fans may not control the TV dial for a pay-per-view purchase. And the events themselves--often an add-on to a countrywide tour--may not have been perceived as being special enough to warrant the TV-ticket price. By contrast, “This is a unique performance, and there are a lot of enthusiastic opera fans around the country,” said Thomas Rogers, president of NBC Cable.

“Rock ‘n’ roll generally has not translated well to being seen on television, and only the most successful mega-bands have exceeded a 2% ‘buy’ rate,” said Seth Willenson, a TV executive who has been involved in pay-per-view since 1984. The “buy rate” is the percentage of pay-per-view homes that purchase an event.

According to data from cable analyst Paul Kagan, a recent Rolling Stones concert, which was priced at $22.50, had only a 1.3% “buy rate”--about 177,777 homes--and took in $4 million in revenue.

By contrast, the Holyfield-Foreman fight in April, the most successful pay-per-view event so far, had an 8% buy rate--about 1.4 million homes--and generated $49 million in revenue. This November’s scheduled fight between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield is expected to go even higher than that.

Willenson, who is working as a marketing consultant on an Oct. 2 pay-per-view concert by Sting at Hollywood Bowl, believes that the Sting concert will do better than usual among rock concerts because, he maintains, Sting has appeal to a broad range of age groups, and there is the filip of the concert being Sting’s 40th birthday.

The Metropolitan Opera gala is seen by its producers as a testing of the pay-per-view waters for cultural programming and an investment in the future, when they hope an expanded pay-per-view universe will more easily support high-end cultural programming. They have a 10-year pact with the Met for future pay-per-view productions.

“Pay-per-view began with high-profile, broad-interest events--boxing and wrestling--that had succeeded in closed-circuit television,” said Marc Lustgarten, vice chairman of Cablevision Systems. “With a small pay-per-view universe, those were the only kind of events that could get a number. But today, the pay-per-view universe is expanding geometrically, adding 5 million pay-per-view households every year as cable systems rebuild and add channels. Within five years, 80% of the cable universe will be able to receive pay-per-view events. So now, the aim is to develop other high-profile events that will draw an audience but won’t have to reach a million viewers in order to succeed.”

If tonight’s offering is successful, NBC, Cablevision and Polygram eventually would like to do two or three pay-per-view events from the Met per season. Candidates for inclusion range from the opening night of a major production to a special event such as an upcoming pension-fund benefit featuring numerous Met stars.

“Cable operators have a long way to go in marketing special events, and the arts require a great deal of money to produce,” said Ed Bleier, president of the pay-per-view unit at Time Warner, the entertainment conglomerate that is one of the distributors of the Met gala. “But eventually, with the expansion of pay-per-view capacity, viewers are going to have the equivalent of a movie multiplex in their TV set, with several channels for pay-per-view, including movies and special events.”

For the Metropolitan Opera, pay-per-view represents a new source of revenue at a time when government support for the arts is declining.

“We’re surviving year to year here, and pay-per-view may mean some earned revenue for us,” said Joseph Volpe, general director of the Met. “It may also bring in new audiences--and potential new supporters.

“I remember when it was first proposed to bring our productions to television. There was concern that we would lose audience for our own performances if people could stay home and watch. Instead, having opera on television has increased our audience and given us more members of our opera guild. The radio and TV performances of the Met are what makes the Met a national company.”

The Met gala might seem to steal some of the thunder from the PBS presentations of opera. On the series “The Metropolitan Opera Presents,” underwritten for many years by Texaco, PBS viewers see three or four Met performances per season, both live and on tape. Volpe insisted that the Met’s venture into pay-per-view would not affect its commitment to PBS.

“I don’t think that a pay-per-view event will hurt the Met on PBS,” he said. “In the long run, I think it would bring additional viewers to opera.”