Movies via the Net could do more than hit your local video hire shop
Jack Schofield
Cliff Stanford has made one fortune by bringing the Internet to the mass market, through Demon Internet, and now he’d like to make another by using the Net to deliver movies. This week, Britain’s Redbus Film Group, of which Stanford is chair, said it had secured the rights to some notable films, but the two-year-old film distribution company won’t launch an Internet service until high-speed access is more widely available.
There’s already a fast-growing market for what the traditional media business calls “video on demand”, but the Internet knows as “streaming media”. The Net can’t yet deliver what Stanford wants – “full-screen TV pictures with VHS quality” – and what the mainstream film-watching public requires. But if you want to be entertained for a minute or three, are receptive to independent productions, and don’t mind watching a screen image the size of a credit card, the Internet already has lots to offer.
It’s been disparaged as “cinema for the MTV generation” and “short attention span theatre”, but you get a front-row seat without leaving your desk, and the latest releases are only a mouse-click away. The leading websites include Atomfilms and iFilm, a film community site, Yahoo! Broadcast and ShortBuzz. Pseudo and LoadTV also provide streamed content but in a more TV-like style. (LoadTV has Death Row Records’ music videos.)
Michael Cornish, managing director of Atomfilms in Europe, says: “We stream more movies than any other website, as far as I know: we’re shipping one to two million movies a month, and it’s growing month on month.”
Film industry hot shots Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg believe streaming video has, in the latter’s words, “unlimited potential”. Their company, DreamWorks, is working with Imagine Entertainment on a site called Pop.com. Warner Bros Online is also exploring Web- based video through its Entertaindom site, launched late last year.
Perhaps the digital wind of change that blew through the publishing industry in the 1980s and the music industry in the 1990s will have a similar impact on the film industry in the coming decade. Certainly the arrival of affordable digital cameras, powerful personal computers and video- editing software will enable a wider range of people to make movies. However, it’s really the Internet that has changed the picture. Thanks to the Net, movies that wouldn’t normally be seen outside a film festival are now available to a global audience. In fact, the Internet has suddenly made short films a prized commodity, with more than a dozen websites competing to attract the best.
While there may not be much money in it, there are real prizes: the Charged webzine and Film.com are running ChargeCoupled, a competition for one-minute movies, while the Web-based Hollywood Film Festival has recently added a Hollywood Digital Film Festival.
In fact, the cinema is going digital in a hurry. “We have digital editing, digital production, digital projection, and in the future we’ll have direct digital distribution,” says Cornish, “so film will disappear.”
Gill Henderson, chief executive of the London Film and Video Development Agency, says: “From the short film-maker’s point of view, the Net is going to be the easiest, quickest and cheapest way of distributing your work. It will blow open a lot of things like copyright and [restricted] territories for selling films. I don’t think a lot of people have thought this through, yet.”
Everyone also agrees that the breakthrough will come with high-speed broadband Internet access via ADSL phone lines or cable modems. These work at least 10 times faster than standard 56K dial-up modems.
“By moving to broadband you get a quantum leap in the quality of the entertainment experience,” Cornish says, “because the picture size moves from being quite small to quite large. It’s as simple as that! You can also bundle in a lot of ancillary information. So broadband becomes the inflection point for really serious growth.”
Stanford says: “We’re working on compression techniques to get the bandwidth down to 512 kilobits per second, which is well within the capabilities of cable modems and ASDL. We could be ready by the end of this year, maybe.”
You could be logging on to the Web to watch movies sooner than you think.