Opera and Pay Cable: Brief Aria : * Television: Tonight’s Met gala on KCET was originally broadcast as a pay-per-view cable event, but the future for further such programming is hazy.

Before it was a PBS special, the Metropolitan Opera’s 25th anniversary gala was a pay-per-view event. (An edited version airs at 7:30 tonight on KCET Channel 28.)

The four-hour gala last September--the first opera performance to be carried live on pay-per-view television--was an ambitious experiment in trying to find events beyond championship boxing and wrestling that cable-TV viewers would be willing to order and pay for on a per-event basis.

The production lost money, however, and the future for further such events is hazy.

The anniversary show--featuring Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Sherrill Milnes--was produced under a 10-year agreement that the Met signed to develop pay-per-view events with NBC Cable and Cablevision Systems, a Long Island-based cable system that is also partnered with NBC in its three-channel, pay-per-view package for the upcoming Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.

Although the gala reached only 23,000 subscribers (well below the 40,000 figure that constituted a break-even point for the production), the results were considered promising enough to executives at Cablevision and the Metropolitan Opera that they are continuing discussions about how to make opera pay-per-view work in the future. But executives at NBC, which is facing financial losses at the TV-network level and the greater financial risks of making the Olympics work on both broadcast and pay-per-view, are not so bullish.

“There are no immediate plans for another Met pay-per-view event,” Tom Rogers, president of NBC Cable, said in an interview. “We have all of our resources geared up to working with cable operators to make the Olympics work on pay-per-view. Success with the Olympics will have more to do with expanding the pay-per-view universe for niche events like the opera. We are not planning to do an opera production through the time-frame of the Olympics. We’ll re-visit the question of considering another opera production during the next opera season, which begins late fall through the end of next year.”

Since it takes time to secure the rights and mount a production for pay-per-view, some industry sources speculated that NBC, in effect, might take a pass on a pay-per-view production for next season. (The 10-year contract with the Met, like many long-term TV deals, is renewable as the partners go along--in this case, every two years.)

However, it is possible, sources said, that the Metropolitan Opera and Cablevision could go ahead with opera pay-per-view events with another partner.

Marc Lustgarten, vice chairman of Cablevision Systems, could not be reached for reaction to Rogers’ comments. But earlier in the week, he had expressed optimism about the prospects for opera pay-per-view.

“The event didn’t do what we had hoped it would do in terms of subscribers, and we’d like to find ways to do productions more economically,” Lustgarten said. “But there were enough signs of success to encourage us. You have to remember that the pay-per-view universe (the number of cable-TV homes equipped with the technology to order pay-per-view events) is still only 18 million homes, although it is expected to grow to 50 million homes in five years. We believe there is an audience for opera on pay-per-view.”

Joseph Volpe, director of the Metropolitan Opera, said in an interview Wednesday that the Met had had recent discussions with Cablevision: “We were delighted with the production, and we hope there’s a future there.”

According to industry sources, the apparent differences in enthusiasm for Met pay-per-view, apart from concerns about bringing the production costs down, has to do with whether the losses of the Met gala are viewed simply as unaffordable red ink in a venture that may never succeed, or as an investment in a new business that could pay off once pay-per-view is widely available.

NBC and Cablevision, sources said, each lost about $100,000 on the production, which cost about $1 million to produce. NBC is said to have spent some $700,000 on promoting the event, which featured not only scenes from “Rigoletto,” “Otello” and “Die Fledermaus” but also “color commentary” by NBC anchors Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric.

The 40,000-subscriber figure (at $34.95 per household) was considered the break-even point for the production--not in total costs but when added to other sales for home video, the foreign market and the PBS telecast. That would have represented a “buy rate” of about one-quarter of 1% of homes that can get pay-per-view. (By contrast, the most successful rock concerts, such as James Brown’s comeback concert, have only achieved a 2% buy rate on pay-per-view, while the most successful pay-per-view event--the Evander Holyfield-George Foreman fight last April--had an 8% buy rate.)

In their defense, pay-per-view promoters say that cable operators still have a lot to learn about aggressively marketing pay-per-view events to their viewers. NBC executives were said to have been disappointed by the level of promotion of the Met event by some operators: Even in New York, some subscribers found, they couldn’t get through on an 800 number to order it.

Lustgarten said that he was encouraged by the Met gala numbers in urban areas and other individual systems that actively marketed the event.

“We had a 1% ‘buy rate’ in Manhattan, and we did very well in several other markets around the country,” he said. “Some 60% of the people who ordered the Met gala were ordering a pay-per-view event for the first time. Opera fans tend to be upscale viewers and loyal fans, and we think they can be a loyal audience for pay-per-view.”

One possible idea under discussion, Lustgarten said, would be to sell a series of several Metropolitan Opera events, packaged together like an opera series.

Both NBC and Cablevision executives said that ways need to be found to make future Met pay-per-view productions more economical, whether through less lavish productions or through increased contributions by outside partners. (Texaco, the corporate underwriter of the PBS telecast, also contributed some money to the pay-per-view production, Volpe said.)

“Every opera production isn’t a 25th anniversary gala, and we would need to make sure that the level of production of future events is appropriate,” Rogers said. “You’d also need a more uniform understanding of working with local opera groups and promoting an event like this in the future.”