The streaming of stage performances was, like so much else, a response to a crisis, and the response has outlasted the crisis that prompted it. The performance that could not be staged in a room was filmed and sent to the homes of the audience that could not attend, and the audience that received it discovered something the industry had spent a century refusing to offer. The stage, it turned out, could travel, and the traveling did not diminish it in the ways the industry had always feared. The question of whether to keep doing it, now that the crisis is over, is the one the industry that owns the stage has not been able to answer, and the inability to answer is itself a story.

The reluctance to stream the stage was always, at heart, an economic one. The performance that is filmed and distributed competes, in the industry's fear, with the performance that is staged and attended, and the competition threatens the ticket sales that sustain the medium. The fear is not unreasonable, in the narrow sense that a person who watches a filmed performance at home is a person who is not paying for a seat. The fear is wrong, in the broader sense that the audience that discovered the stage through the stream is an audience that now attends the stage, and the discovery is a thing the medium had failed to achieve on its own for the whole of the preceding century.

The audience the stream created

The audiences that found the stage through the stream were the audiences the stage had been failing to reach. The person in a city the tour never visited, the person whose schedule could not accommodate an evening at the theater, the person who had never been invited to consider the medium — these were the audiences that the stream reached, and the reaching was the thing the industry's distribution model had structurally excluded. The filmed performance did not cannibalize the existing audience, because the existing audience was already attending. It created a new one, and the new one has begun, in the years since, to attend the stage it discovered on screen.

The economics, properly measured, support the inclusion rather than the exclusion. The stream generates revenue of its own, from the audiences that pay for it, and the revenue is the kind the stage had no other way to earn. The audience that watches the filmed performance and then buys a ticket to the staged one is an audience that was acquired at a lower cost than any the medium's marketing had managed, and the acquisition is the part of the story the fear of cannibalization keeps obscuring. The stage that streams is a stage that grows, and the growth is the thing the industry has been declining by refusing to allow.

The rights that hold the medium back

The barrier to the wider streaming of the stage is not, at this point, technological or even economic. It is legal, and the legality is the part the industry has been unable to untangle. The rights to a stage performance are divided among the people who made it — the writer, the composer, the director, the performers, the designers — and the divisions were negotiated in an era that did not imagine the filmed performance would be distributed to homes. The rights holders, reasonably, want to be paid for the distribution, and the payment structures that would satisfy them have not been worked out, and the not working out has left a vast catalog of performances that could be streamed and are not, because the permissions cannot be assembled.

The resolution will require the industry to renegotiate, collectively, the terms on which a stage performance can be filmed and distributed, and the renegotiation is the kind of collective action the industry has never been good at. The unions, the producers, and the rights holders will have to agree, and the agreement will have to be generous enough to make the filming worthwhile and protective enough to preserve the medium's economics. The negotiations are underway, in fits and starts, and the outcome will determine whether the stage that traveled during the crisis continues to travel after it.

The stage that could be everywhere

The streaming of the stage is, potentially, the largest expansion of the medium's audience in its history, and the potential is the thing the industry is failing to decide about. The stage that travels is a stage that reaches the people it has always excluded, and the reaching is the thing the medium's mission, if it has one, has always implied it should do. The decision to keep streaming is a decision to let the stage be more than the room it is staged in, and the decision is one the industry has the power to make and has, so far, declined to. The question the streaming of Broadway refuses to answer is not whether the stage can travel. It has traveled. The question is whether the industry will let it keep going, and the answer, when it comes, will determine how large the audience for the stage becomes.