-Caveat Lector- GOING TO THE MOVIES ONLINE Big screen comes to Net watchers AtomFilms About 500 animations and shorts. Big-name partners include Warner Bros. Interactive. Goofy-gorey 'Gerbil' animated series by Joe Cartoon is almost a cult favorite. Star Trak spoof also a hoot. http://www.atomfilms.com/ Digital Entertainment Network Inc. Aimed at 14-24 year old Generation ‘Y’ers, DEN programs include frat-boy, punk, hip-hop shows. Also has big name sponsors, investors like Microsoft, has filed to go public. Will reopen site Nov. 8. http://den.com/ iFilm.com About 500 shorts. Users vote, top 25 rankings on homepage fetch out best films. Peephole is nearly always in that list. http://ifilm.net/main.taf Pseudo.com More than 250 hours of home-grown programming each week on 10 channels include all-gamer network, computer hacking show. http://www.pseudo.com/ Thebitscreen.com Limited, focused selection of four high-quality films. City Halls is a 'media well' with words, music and images configured randomly each time. http://www.thebitscreen.com/ /Thesync.com/ Small collection of home-grown programs with big names, including The Jenni Show, featuring Net’s first Web-cam star; and /etc, a tech show hosted by popular slashdot.org computer news site. http://thesync.com/ Wirebreak.com Flashiest site, interactive animation augments highly-produced video programs. Gilette sponsorship. Biggest hit - Girls Locker Talk. http://ww1.wirebreak.com/home/index.php3 ShortTV Started by a former short film maker, it has a small, refined library. Also a cable TV station. Among its top showings is Lurker, a dark film about a woman who hangs around a laundromat too long http://shorttv.com/ http://www.msnbc.com/news/331043.asp Big screen comes to Net watchers As Dreamworks joins the fray, original shorts, animations, and talk shows flood the Web By Bob Sullivan <Picture: Image: AtomFilms.com screen shot>Animations, like this claymation spoof of Star Trek, are among the most popular Net films. MSNBC Nov. 5, This year's MP3. The next MTV. That's the kind of hyperbole surrounding the short Internet video entertainment category that’s gone from irrelevant, to irritating, to "validated" in less than a year. Last week, Microsoft founder Paul Allen gave Hollywood hotshots Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard $50 million to figure how to entertain the Internet's masses with short videos. But some think Howard and Spielberg are already late, as a crowded field of former Hollywood executives and ambitious filmmakers have already filled the Web with thousands of short films and TV-style shows. "It's still a much sexier angle to call your parents and say 'My film is going to be on TV.'" ROLAND DIB - ShortTV WHY ALL THIS EXCITEMENT over postage-stamp-sized moving pictures that haven't really earned anyone a dime yet? When even the biggest live streaming video event didn't grab a big enough to warrant an second episode, were it a TV sitcom? When the potential audience (at least for broadband video) is scarcely 1 percent of the TV audience? A RAPID EVOLUTION "What is apparent is the Web is going through the next step in its hourly evolution," said Jeff Morris, CEO of Yack.com, which is trying to be the "TV Guide" of Net video programming. The progression has been swift from plain text, to still images, to downloadable music via MP3. Video is the inevitable next step, he said, and it will inevitably come faster than we expect. "There's a growing sense that the train has left the station. ... I think the video industry has learned a little from the music industry. They were a little asleep at the wheel and MP3 showed up." Short Net films have been circulating for nearly two years, about as long as some of the more popular Net film Web sites. Thebitscreen.com, for example, has been toiling in relative obscurity, accepting short artistic films since June 1998. Pseudo.com has been producing original for-the-Web shows since 1997. Most audiences still are counted in the hundreds, while the available videos number in the thousands. Still, earlier this year, things started to heat up with the launch of well-funded sites like atomfilms.com and ifilms.com. Luminaries were attracted, like former Paramount Digital Entertainment head David Wertheimer (now CEO of Wirebreak.com) and former Walt Disney Network Television president David Neuman (Digital Entertainment Network president). Microsoft, a partner in MSNBC, owns part of Digital Entertainment Network. And now, the big boys are coming to play. Spielberg and Howard expect their new venture, pop.com, to launch next year; meanwhile, Warner Brothers Interactive will launch entertaindom.com before the end of the year. It will offer up plenty of original content, include made-for-the-Web new episodes of DC Comics' Superman. "It's a good thing for the industry we're in," said Digital Entertainment Network's Anna Caldwell. "The people behind pop have big names. It's helping validate what we've been doing for the past year and a half." WHY NOW? There's sharp disagreement about just how much broadband will impact the Net video business in the short term, but most film companies say even the whiff of broadband that's in the air has been enough to fish out big players to the Net film business. :Advertisers inevitably want to know the M in CP/M." MATT HULETT - Atomfilms.com "People forget that broadband is, in fact, here now," said Warner Bros. Interactive's Jim Bannister. For example, most colleges, with their ideal Generation Y demographics, have fast Net connections. "If you care to research the numbers, you'll see that there is an inordinately high percentage of stream being served in broadband." Pseudo.com says about 40 percent of its users are coming through a broadband connection. But broadband tells only part of the story of the ascendancy of the category. What seemed to really shake Hollywood was the startling success of "The Blair Witch Project." Shot for well under $100,000, the film has already pocketed millions for directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Many credit the phenomenon to the film's Web site, which was running and generating buzz long before the movie was released on the big screen. "That took quite a few people by surprise," Morris said. HOW THEY'RE DIFFERENT Net shows include much of the fare you'd expect from film makers with names like "Primitive Pictures." There's plenty of attention-groping sex talk shows, like "Girls Locker Talk," "Luscious," and "Cyberlove." Another format that plays well is short parodies. There's practically an entire industry in "Blair Witch" mockery, for example. Animation pieces are also a hit, since they require smaller amounts of data and can be downloaded much faster. Wirebreak uses a combination of racy animation and streaming video to attract attention. Thanks to the limitations bandwidth imposes on films (bitscreen.com's Nora Barry calls them "parameters, not limitations," Net shows are necessarily different. To make life easier for compression algorithms, directors are urged to keep movement to a minimum; wide pans and complicated transitions are discouraged. The videos are small, so nuances are easily missed, and large, simple singular images have the most impact. And perfectionists need not apply; aesthetics like lighting tones can't really be controlled, since the film looks slightly different each time viewed. But there are several new tools at a filmmaker's disposal. Bitscreen offers one movie that is stored in parts and assembles itself randomly each time. Live, interactive chats with talk-show hosts are a staple, and since most shows have a few hundred viewers at best, chatters act like a live studio audience and can actually participate in the shows. WHAT BUSINESS PLAN? New techniques also allow for new marketing plans. When Arizona Jeans agreed to sponsor a Pseudo.com show called Funk, the first scene was remade and all the characters redrawn wearing, of course, Arizona Jeans. Several sites even mentioned the potential for personalized product placement. If a 17-year-old is watching a movie, that bottle on the table would be Coke. If a 30-year-old is watching, the bottle become Cabernet Sauvignon. More traditional sponsorships from big-name retail and tech firms are trickling in. DEN, for example, has signed up Pepsi. Wirebreak shows 30-second spots hawking Gillette's Mach 3 razor. Still, original content can come only so cheap. DEN says it can spend $40,000 on some episodes. That's why, according to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has no earnings or revenues to speak of. "We think you can't be an Internet-only company," Atomfilm's Matt Hulett said. "Advertisers inevitably want to know the M in CP/M." Hundreds of viewers for a talk show, no matter how focused the group can be, will never excite an advertisers. So Atomfilms hopes to make as much money from content buyers as it does from advertisers. The company licenses its film collection to other Web sites, airlines, even cable TV stations. "We're looking for lots of ways to monazite that film." That's the strategy employed by ShortTV, a New York-based company that's a cable outlet first, Web outlet second. "Our business model doesn't call for revenue generated by our Web site," said president Roland Dib. The ShortTV cable station is available to 2 million viewers in New York and a few other major markets, and that's how Dib expects to make money. "The point is to introduce short films to the masses. The Net is another place to distribute ... but it’s still a much sexier angle to call your parents and say 'My film is going to be on TV.'" Despite Dib's pessimism, Warner Bros' Bannister is not only convinced the time is right for Net video entertainment, he's also convinced his company has a serious leg up on its upstart competitors. "We do have a vision .. with a strong pragmatism mixed with our understanding of how ... the dynamic that drives teenage boys to see 'The Matrix' seven times in row is very different than what drives business men to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal." * * * * * ============================================================== Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day. ================================================================= DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. 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