Beyond the movie theater

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Coming soon to a theater near you: Not necessarily a movie.

On a recent Saturday afternoon at the Regal Cinemas theater in Ballston, a long line of gray-haired patrons had lined up outside the ticket window, bristling with anticipation and quite uninterested in whatever movie topped the box-office that weekend.

A special re-release of "Cocoon"?

Nope: It was a live performance of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" by New York City's Metropolitan Opera, beaming via satellite into a high-definition theater in the corner of an Arlington shopping mall.

More than a hundred other theaters across the country were carrying the same simulcast feed -- a feat made possible by digital-cinema technology that has generated sharp growth in "alternative in-theater programming." That's industry-speak for such non-Hollywood fare as NASCAR's Daytona 500, the Tour de France, footage from the annual Coachella music festival and, yes, the opera.

Imagine that: Rather than enticing them to stay on the couch or the computer chair, there's a digital thingamajig that's actually encouraging human beings to patronize the movie theaters they are perpetually threatening to desert.

"It's going very well," says a theater manager at Ballston Common Mall, which will carry the Met's performance of Puccini's "Il Trittico" later this month. "All the operas are selling out. I'd say 80 percent are people who haven't been to this theater before."

At last month's ShoWest, the annual industry showcase in Las Vegas, conventioneers got a taste of the Super Bowl in 3-D, according to Brad Brown, president of the marketing company Brown Entertainment Group. "It's the Wild West for alternative-media sources," he says. "Nothing is unexpected anymore."

Before it became an instrument of mass sports-and-entertainment spectacle, digital-cinema technology began more humbly as a vehicle for pre-feature advertising -- still its most profitable platform.

Roughly five years ago, Regal Entertainment Group, the nation's biggest theater chain, began linking its theaters to a digital network that offers short-form segments, broadcast-television content and other, slicker alternatives to the low-budget slide shows of yesteryear.