The Royal Danish Theatre

My name is Peter Schaufuss, and I am responsible for electronic media at the Royal Danish Theatre. When I started a year and a half ago, the theatre had done a little bit of video online. Not very much. It wasn't a consistent thing. It was more a little bit here and a little bit there. A few months after I started, we discussed the idea of using video more constantly to promote the different performances in terms of trailers, if you can call it that. And the ambition was to actually produce a trailer for basically every show that we set up, which is about 60, 70 performances a year. If you take it to the corporate world, we have 60 to 70 product releases every year. So the amount of marketing cash per release is actually quite small. We had a lot of discussions initially about how do we produce this content? Do we buy an HD camera and do we shoot it ourselves or find some intern that maybe is interested in video production and get him or her to shoot it? But we ended up with having a professional production company doing the videos because we wanted a certain level of quality since we are the National Theatre of Denmark. So we have to maintain at least for the trailer videos, we have to have a certain quality also showing as respect to the artist and showing the performance has to be both the visuals and the sound has to be okay. The platform was quite easy because, I mean, that's why we're sitting here because we chose 23 video and that was basically a turnkey solution more or less with a little bit support from you guys in terms of a few design tips. But otherwise it was basically just setting up the account and uploading the video and We did a little bit experimenting in terms of bit rates and stuff but it was pretty simple. Basically it's a matter of resources being the limit I think because we could do more or less whatever we wanted to do now because we have this channel and people are used to watching it. We play I think the latest figures about we have 3000 video plays every 24 hours. So people watch these things a lot and so basically we could do whatever we want. Unfortunately we are only a few people doing it so there's a limit to what we can do in terms of resources but in terms of technology there's really no limit. Looking at organizations selling or showing performances, experiences, then the video is the ultimate way of doing that short of getting people actually in the door because you can actually show what's going on on stage or wherever it takes place and you can, as a viewer, you can get a feel for what is this all about that you cannot get from just print or a webpage, a static webpage.