Online Movies in Infancy, but Showing Promise

Steven Spielberg talked of its “unlimited potential.” Ron Howard described it as “stimulating and liberating.” And Jeffrey Katzenberg compared it to the dawn of MTV.

These are the soaring expectations for Internet filmmaking and animation heading into 2000. But then, none of these Hollywood heavyweights is giving up his day job.

This was a breakthrough year for a crop of new Web sites, including Atomfilms.com and Ifilm.net, which showed that there is significant consumer interest in short movies and cartoons that can be viewed online.

By the end of 1999, major Hollywood players had entered the space. Warner Bros. unveiled its Entertaindom.com site, and DreamWorks and Imagine Entertainment announced the creation of Pop.com, expected to launch next spring.

Even so, the Net is still a fledgling entertainment medium at best, with profits a distant prospect for all of the major players.

The primary obstacle to reaching a mass audience remains bandwidth. Only 5% of the nation’s 100 million households are expected to have high-speed Internet connection by the end of 2000 compared with about 2% now, according to Jupiter Communications.

This means that for the vast majority of home Internet users, watching even a short cartoon will, for the foreseeable future, require extraordinary patience and a willingness to endure low-quality images in a viewing window about the size of a postcard.

Yet there is excitement over this segment of the entertainment market, because after years of false starts, the convergence of entertainment and high-technology finally seems to be within sight.

Many analysts and industry executives expect 2000 to yield a handful of crossover hits, meaning the embrace by the traditional television and movie industry of filmmakers and animators who found their initial audience online.

It is already guaranteed to have crossovers in the opposite direction. Movie directors Howard and Spielberg, both part owners of Pop.com, have committed to creating their first Internet-only works. More recently, the creators of the “South Park” television cartoon series signed a deal to create a new set of shows for the Shockwave.com entertainment site.

Who will be the bigger force in online entertainment? Spielberg or Joe Cartoon, the online pseudonym of the creator of such animated shorts as “Frog in a Blender,” a very popular show on Atomfilms?

There is no shortage of content. Rodger Raderman, founder of Ifilm, said the number of submissions by amateur filmmakers “is growing exponentially,” fueled by a technological revolution that enables filmmakers to produce professional-looking works with a $2,000 digital camera and a $2,000 PC.

Other industry leaders say that sites such as Ifilm and Atomfilms are poised to help move consumers into an age of entertainment, everywhere, all the time.

Mika Salmi, founder of Internet movie site Atomfilms.com, said his company’s films are already being shown on airplanes and in shopping malls. It won’t be long, he says, before consumers are watching short films on their cell phones and Palm Pilots.

“Otis Elevator is going to start putting video screens and Internet connections in elevators,” Salmi said. Another outlet for his growing film library? “Why not?” he said.