Humbled Dot-Coms Still Major Presence at Sundance Festival

The dot-coms are digging in at the Sundance Film Festival.

A year after the first swarm of Internet companies invaded America’s premiere independent film festival, a smaller, more subdued cadre of dot-coms has returned to Park City, Utah.

Shaking off the effects of last year’s bloodletting on Wall Street, the dot-coms are ready to try again to connect with Hollywood. Their continued interest reflects how the Internet and digital technologies are infiltrating the filmmaking industry, particularly the indie world that Sundance celebrates.

Though many in Hollywood have embraced the Net as a promotional tool, the dot-coms want to play a much bigger role. They believe they can revolutionize the way films are made, discovered and distributed.

This year’s Sundance dot-com returnees are on a mission: Instead of just making a name for themselves, they are focused on making money. “It’s going to be down to business, and less down to creating impressions,” said Ian Calderon, director of digital initiatives for Sundance.

A good example is AtomFilms, a leading distributor of short movies on and off the Web. Last year, Atom’s Winnebago-mounted, traffic-snarling screening room was one of the most visible symbols of the dot-com invasion. This year, the company is ditching the RV in favor of a storefront on Main Street, where it plans to screen films for potential buyers and schmooze with filmmakers.

Atom also plans a bigger, although still bare-bones, late-night bash. Instead of cramming party-goers into an overflowing hillside condo, the company is renting a barn.

“Our sponsors [Ford Motor Co., Intel Corp. and RealNetworks] want to throw a party. They want to have a presence,” said Jannat Gargi, vice president of acquisitions and development for Atom. “It’s not like we’re having it at the Four Seasons. It’s in a barn.”

The demise of dozens of Web entertainment companies, however, has caused the survivors to revise their message at Sundance, said Gene Klein, vice president of content at Hypnotic (formerly ReelShorts.com).

“There was a lot of talk about the Internet, almost the Internet alone, being the savior of the short [movie] form and being the next great thing for films,” Klein said of last year’s Sundance. Now, dot-coms aren’t relying on the Net alone to reach audiences and collect revenues.

Sundance this year is taking official notice of the new technologies changing the industry. The festival’s organizers launched a center this year to demonstrate how each step in the filmmaking process is going digital. They’re also holding an online film festival, featuring 18 works that were made just for the Net.

Much of the technical and financial support for the online festival comes from a dot-com, StreamSearch.com International, that has felt the sting of the financial markets’ repudiation of the Net. It recently laid off 150 of its 210 employees, including the one who helped put together the deal with Sundance.

Rob Shambro, chief executive and founder of StreamSearch, said one of his company’s main businesses now is helping other firms bring audio and video events to the Web. It’s costing StreamSearch less than $15,000 to manage and produce the Sundance festival, he said, and it stands to make money from sponsorships.

Calderon said StreamSearch is better off than many of the dot-coms that wanted to throw money at the festival last year. A common trait among those now-defunct companies, Calderon said, is that they didn’t have a business reason for being at Sundance--they just wanted to have their names associated with it.

“There’ll be less big banners hanging off of buildings, there’ll be less buses with shrink-wrapped logos, there’ll be less fliers. . . . The thunder will be significantly reduced,” he said.

For example, Hollywood.com (now Hollywood Media Corp.) will be back collecting Sundance news for its Web site, but it won’t reprise the 36-foot geodesic dome it built last year with Microsoft Corp. and Troma in downtown Park City. “We are using our marketing and promotion dollars this year more evenly around all of our media properties,” explained Mary Hall, vice president of operations.

Another example is ShowBiz Data’s Interactive Lounge on Main Street. Last year the Lounge was a hodgepodge of Internet and media companies; this year’s participants have a more direct connection to the film business, particularly the distribution of feature films online.

“Never mind the fact that there’s another dot-com disaster every day,” said Jim Steele, an executive vice president at ShowBiz Data. “What’s going on from a tech point of view, what we’re demonstrating up here, is incredibly exciting.”

Those demonstrations include a group of dot-coms showing how films look when encrypted and transmitted over the Net with Microsoft’s software. It’s not just a theoretical exercise--those companies actually are transmitting films to Web surfers.

One of them is CinemaNow of Marina del Rey, which announced plans Friday to present first-run features from Lion’s Gate on a pay-per-view basis. Lion’s Gate, which owns a majority of CinemaNow, plans to make the films available over the Internet at the same time they hit the pay-per-view channels on TV, starting this month.

While CinemaNow is at Sundance to attract more films for its site, Yahoo is in the Interactive Lounge to make friends in the biz. Tiffany Hein, Yahoo’s entertainment brand manager, said the company wants to build a symbiotic relationship with filmmakers: Yahoo helps promote their work and they provide exclusive content that draws viewers to the Web site.

Other dot-coms don’t see such a direct relationship between their ongoing businesses and Sundance. And many of them are staying home this year.

For example, Excite@Home, a leading Web portal and high-speed Internet access service, was a “leadership sponsor” of Sundance 2000 but a no-show in 2001. The company wanted to introduce its high-speed Net video service to filmmakers last year, said spokeswoman Stephanie Rudnick, but it had nothing new to show off at Sundance this year.

“Another thing, it was kind of out of control last year,” Rudnick said of the dot-com deluge at Sundance 2000. “We were competing [for attention] with a lot of dot-coms. Many of them aren’t around anymore.”

And some dot-coms that marketed themselves heavily at last year’s Sundance, such as the now-beleaguered MovieConnect of Sherman Oaks, simply can’t afford to do it again this year. “Everyone’s running a tight budget,” said Judd Payne, MovieConnect’s president.

This year’s festival could be a last hurrah for Entertaindom, Warner Bros. Online’s outlet for original programming.

The company plans its second annual concert series at Harry-O’s, featuring such well-known alternative-rock bands as the Dandy Warhols, Semisonic and, possibly, Radiohead. The point is to attract viewers to Entertaindom’s Web site, which will carry the concerts live via the Internet. But Warner Bros. may end Entertaindom’s life as a separate brand, sending the site into extinction.