From 5-minutes to 15-minutes, The World of Online Shorts
Earlier this year, the video search engine Blinkx.TV partnered with a group of short film providers—LoveFilm, Tiscali, BBC Film Network, World Cinema Online and others to make thousands of hours of worth of short films available online. It was only the latest move by a company determined to get in on the media revolution that’s leaning more and more heavily on the world-wide-web.
"Shorts have a growing following globally; all the major film festivals now incorporate a section devoted to showcasing them,” said Suranga Chandratillake, Founder and CTO of Blinkx.
This isn’t the first time that comenators have been stepping up to declare that virtually overnight, the ineternet seems to have become “thee” place for entertainment. Back in the late 1990s a slate of online soap operas ignited the same buzz machine before flarring out just as quickly as they’d arrived. But today those predictions, with the exception of those attributing “overnight success” to an eight year-old company like Atom Entertainment, are getting it just about right.
The broadband connections available to hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide have led media behemoths from NBC and Disney to Viacom to purchase stakes in popular web portals in order to take an active hand in steering traffic to their publicity and commerce sites. Increasingly these same media conglomerates are partnering with short film websites— basically viewing them as farm teams for tomorrow's entertainment franchises.
Supplied by a growing army of computer savvy independent filmmakers from Greenwich Village to Wicker Park to Santa Monica, a solid block of shorts oriented sites has emerged. From the comedy centric Icebox to Shorts T.V. to the comparatively tiny UrbanChillers and the higher profile eBaum’s World—an online comedy showcase that boast over a million hits a day. Together, they’ve quietly become a New Hollywood that’s offering up hundreds of short bursts of entertainment for desktops everywhere.
Funded by a combination of underwriting/partnerships schemes and advertising placed in front of or besides the shorts, alt-online TV networks are still on the rise. CHANNEL 101, for example, only attracts around 30,000 viewers a day with its slate of audience programmed 5-minute comedies.
"We had a strong sense when we started there was an audience that wanted alternative entertainment content," said Mika Salmi, the founder and CEO of AtomFilms. "At some point the internet, or broadband entertainment, will be the home base for anything related to video. Some will look like odds and ends, some will look like TV. We want to provide the right content ... we believe in snack-sized content."
For would-be producers, the most important fact to take out of all of this is that all of these online venues are more or less fully dependant on submissions from independent filmmakers. But the history of the film business (as epitomized by the Hal Roach Studios or to a lesser degree the Republic Pictures model) seems to suggest that specialized shorts production companies are the next step over the horizon.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
"Shorts have a growing following globally; all the major film festivals now incorporate a section devoted to showcasing them,” said Suranga Chandratillake, Founder and CTO of Blinkx.
This isn’t the first time that comenators have been stepping up to declare that virtually overnight, the ineternet seems to have become “thee” place for entertainment. Back in the late 1990s a slate of online soap operas ignited the same buzz machine before flarring out just as quickly as they’d arrived. But today those predictions, with the exception of those attributing “overnight success” to an eight year-old company like Atom Entertainment, are getting it just about right.
The broadband connections available to hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide have led media behemoths from NBC and Disney to Viacom to purchase stakes in popular web portals in order to take an active hand in steering traffic to their publicity and commerce sites. Increasingly these same media conglomerates are partnering with short film websites— basically viewing them as farm teams for tomorrow's entertainment franchises.
Supplied by a growing army of computer savvy independent filmmakers from Greenwich Village to Wicker Park to Santa Monica, a solid block of shorts oriented sites has emerged. From the comedy centric Icebox to Shorts T.V. to the comparatively tiny UrbanChillers and the higher profile eBaum’s World—an online comedy showcase that boast over a million hits a day. Together, they’ve quietly become a New Hollywood that’s offering up hundreds of short bursts of entertainment for desktops everywhere.
Funded by a combination of underwriting/partnerships schemes and advertising placed in front of or besides the shorts, alt-online TV networks are still on the rise. CHANNEL 101, for example, only attracts around 30,000 viewers a day with its slate of audience programmed 5-minute comedies.
"We had a strong sense when we started there was an audience that wanted alternative entertainment content," said Mika Salmi, the founder and CEO of AtomFilms. "At some point the internet, or broadband entertainment, will be the home base for anything related to video. Some will look like odds and ends, some will look like TV. We want to provide the right content ... we believe in snack-sized content."
For would-be producers, the most important fact to take out of all of this is that all of these online venues are more or less fully dependant on submissions from independent filmmakers. But the history of the film business (as epitomized by the Hal Roach Studios or to a lesser degree the Republic Pictures model) seems to suggest that specialized shorts production companies are the next step over the horizon.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
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