Is theatre going down the YouTube?

On The Guardian Theatre blog, Andrew Haydon considers the implications of the growing number of theatre clips online.

Looking beyond fan clips to promotional videos and viral advertising online, there is a real question whether artists featured in such videos should be paid some kind of royalties. Indeed, do these clips do the artists any favours? They are necessarily the translation of something that works in one medium into another where it might not look half as good. After all, acting for a camera is very different to acting for row H in the upper circle. All of these questions are very new and will doubtless resolve themselves over time, as new media becomes more and more a part of the way in which we experience the world. But they do raise the interesting issue of how we might usefully go about presenting theatre online or on video.