Met Opera on Demand

It genuinely blows my mind that the greatest Opera House in the world, in my opinion, has had an app for over a decade and a half that doesn’t even pretend to work on any kind of consistent level. I probably cancel my subscription every couple of months and wait several years before downloading this app again. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to watch all of your favorite operas with your favorite singers with an outstanding Orchestra and all of this design be literally impossible to view because of how poorly the app is run. There is no excuse for this. We’ve had streaming services for almost 20 years now and people like the Berlin Philharmonic, Medici, in the Royal Opera House don’t have these kinds of problems whatsoever. I wish I could say that I might as well flip a coin but that assumes that the app even works half the time. Why is it that even videos downloaded for off-line usage don’t work? It’s genuinely embarrassing to the point that I would have thought that at some point over the last 15 years somebody somewhere in some data area would spend. The two weeks that it would take to basically start from scratch. But alas, here we are. I’m running out of space to write, but this app just angers me so much. The content is so good, why can’t I freaking see it?

I recently got a smart TV and was so excited to get this app as I am a huge opera fan and amateur vocalist myself. I got the app on TV first but it was having trouble creating an account and subscribing. So I downloaded on my phone, eventually I got the subscription to work and can access operas. I love watching them but here’s the problem - it doesn’t save favorites, and doesn’t save your place so you can resume, which is a big problem because its pretty common to not watch a 4 hour opera in one sitting. So every time I go into the app I have to find my opera all over again and toggle to approximately where I left off. This is especially disappointing since Met considers themselves such the elites, but the can’t get a programmer to fix this simple problems. I see now in the reviews everyone has the same problem with these apps. What a disappointment.

I have done my best to support MET, but the technical infrastructure is just abysmal. The app malfunctions so often that even a die-hard opera fan like myself would consider giving up. I have been watching MET make poor decisions for its survival for years, but I hope they are wise enough to salvage their digital income by investing a better technical team.