Is this the future of theatre?

Though they could casually out-act most of Hollywood, Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw are the last people most of us would expect to see playing the leads in a big-budget comedy down our local cinema. And yet in June this year, that's exactly what happened, with a live broadcast of the National Theatre's 'London Assurance' selling out movie theatres across the country.

As the rise of 3D eases us towards an incrementally dumber era of blockbusters, so other advances in film technology - specifically in digital capture - are redressing the balance, allowing for dynamic, high-quality live theatre broadcasts that can hold their own in the cinematographic landscape of 2010, a world away from the staid camerawork of 'Play for Today' et al.

But 'London Assurance' was a huge show already - ditto successful live broadcasts from Glyndebourne and New York's Met Opera. How does the evident appetite for digitally recorded theatre translate into smaller productions, into the wider topography of the British theatre landscape?

Don Boyd, founder of the website Hibrow.tv, thinks he has the answer. 'Hibrow came about from a sense of frustration, rage in some places, about the paucity of arts coverage on television,' says Boyd, 'and my editorial conviction that there were a large number of people and organisations whose work could reach a much larger public than they could possibly get in the current environment.'

Hibrow is intended as a multi-platform streaming website 'dedicated to all of the arts comprehensively, without the form of editorial tyranny that has been so associated with arts coverage on television. We are intending to be the conduit to original work that will be made in a variety of environments: galleries, theatres, opera houses, concert halls, places where they play poetry.'

Over a coffee, Boyd - producer of 'Scum' and 'The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle', and director of numerous acclaimed documentaries - talks an excellent talk, rattling off a formidable list of potential collaborators and curators, from Richard Eyre to the Liverpool Philharmonic. To somebody who knows nothing about these things, the array of cameras and operators at Hibrow's disposal seems impressive. The vision - building up an online archive of live recordings of British cultural events, from all across the country, accessible at a click of a button, saved forever, funded purely by sponsorship and advertising - is positively utopian.

Still, at present Hibrow.tv is simply a holding page. But everything has to start somewhere, and it gets underway next week with 'Traverse Live', a programme of new writing from Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre. In partnership with Time Out, it will be broadcast online and at Picturehouse cinemas on Monday August 23 at 7pm, and should thereafter be available to rewatch indefinitely on the Hibrow website.

Several hundred miles north of London, and Traverse artistic director Dominic Hill is looking a little frayed. It's August, meaning the UK arts community has decamped to Edinburgh, with the Traverse - Scotland's new writing powerhouse - the focus of much of the attention. Or as he drily puts it, it's 'the one month of the year London arrives'.

'Traverse Live' is actually a compilation of the theatre's morning programme of ultra stripped-down new short plays. Going out under the umbrella title 'Impossible Things Before Breakfast', it runs this week and next, a play a day performed at the positively frisky hour of 9am, with all five performed back-to-back for the one-off evening broadcast. Some of the UK and Ireland's most exciting playwrights have contributed, with an almost gratuitously impressive line up of Simon Stephens (whose 'T5' Hill will direct), Enda Walsh, Marina Carr, Linda McLean and David Eldridge each offering a 30-minute piece.

Hill describes their efforts as 'very text focused; they're all quite poetic, sometimes from writers you wouldn't expect, like David Eldridge. They remind me of a sort of strand of work that's more akin to Beckett and Pinter; it's just going to be the actor and the word. Simon's piece is a monologue about a housewife who suddenly decides one day that she's not going to do what she ought to do; what Simon's so brilliant at is this amazing honesty, he sort of strips away any kind of correctness, he really gets to the heart of what makes us human - he's very good at unveiling the dark side of everyday people and everyday lives'.

Even if Hibrow becomes everything Boyd hopes it will, it's a process that is going to take time: as of Monday, it will have an archive of five short plays, nothing more. Yet with the technology and - hopefully - the audience in place, the project as a whole really does have astounding potential; if Hibrow doesn't work out, you can be sure somebody else will be doing something similar in a few years' time. However, the simple fact of the matter is that as of Monday evening, everyone with a web connection or a nearby Picturehouse cinema will be able to watch works by five of the very best playwrights in the world, works that might otherwise have been seen a couple of times in a small Scottish theatre and never again. And if you do happen to catch it as the Traverse, what will that involve, exactly? 'A hell of a lot of cameras!' grins Hill.

'Traverse Live' plays at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Picturehouse Cinemas and www.hibrow.tv at 7pm on Mon Aug 23