Digital Theatre Review

In my first post here I mentioned that I got to see a recording of a stage production from this summer via Digital Theatre, so I thought I'd provide a brief review of what I thought of the program.

Basically the way it works is you go onto their site (www.digitaltheatre.com) and from there you can either purchase or rent recordings of recent plays. Before you can watch anything, you have to download the Digital Theatre video player, which is free. It sounds pretty amazing and convenient, but I wouldn't recommend using them unless there's a play you're just absolutely dying to see.

The primary reason is that I don't think I've ever suffered through using a glitchier program in my life. After downloading the player, I had to download the movie from the program, which was going to take about eight hours or so. Unfortunately, if the computer was turned off or the internet was shut off, not only would it stop downloading, it would cancel the download and return to the beginning. Because of that, I wasn't able to download the entire thing for nearly five days, until the weekend, when I could leave my computer open and running all day. After I finally got the whole thing downloaded, I thought I was good to go, but it turned out, not only was the program remarkably bad at downloading things, it was remarkably bad at playing them too.

The main problem was this one glitch that happened approximately every twenty minutes. The little marker of where I was in the play would suddenly return to the beginning and stop moving entirely. For a few minutes, the movie would progress as normal, but then one of two things would happen. Either the sound from the beginning would start playing over whatever part of the movie I was in, or the sound from the place I left off would play simultaneously as the sound and video from the beginning. The only remedy was the shut down the whole program and download the entire movie again. Because, as I learned, when you shut down the program, the whole movie deletes itself and has to be downloaded again.

While I generally plan on watching each movie I review at least twice, I only got through this once. I considered watching it again, but I decided for the sake of my sanity to leave it at that and not attempt a second viewing.

It's a real pity that the program's so bad, since it has recordings of so many plays I'd love to see, but I think it would take something truly once-in-a-lifetime spectacular to persuade me to try using it again.

If you're more patient that I am, and really really determined to see a certain production, go for it. Otherwise, skip it.