Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Internet
visited Star Wars fan Websites, other fans deluged
Lucasfilm with angry emails, prompting Lucasfilm to
apologize to its fans for the "miscommunication" in a
letter posted on the Web. Lucasfilm has since created an
official partnership with the Website AtomFilms.com to
distribute the many Star Wars videos and films produced
by fans.
MOVIE DISTRIBUTION AND THE INTERNET
The Internet quickly became a significant retail outlet for
the distribution or sale of DVD releases, and by 2001 all
of the major film companies had partnered with the
Internet Movie Database, or IMDb (www.imdb.com),
and leading online retailer Amazon.com to promote
new theatrical films, personalize movie showtimes, and
sell DVDs. In October 1990, IMDb started as the
Usenet newsgroup bulletin board rec.arts.movies to
which volunteers would post information about films
and discuss movies with other fans. With the advent of
the Web, the bulletin board was transformed into one of
the most visited sites on the Internet, averaging over 30
million visitors each month and containing over 6 million
individual film credits, including information on
over 400,000 films, 1 million actors and actresses, and
100,000 directors. The IMDb has also built a strong
sense of community among its almost 9 million registered
users, who can post to the public discussion forum
available for each film and rate a film between 1 and 10.
All of this information lends itself to the customized links
available for celebrity news and gossip, images of stars,
box-office and sales statistics, and Amazon.com for DVD
purchases.
In addition to providing easy access to detailed
information about films and convenient ways for consumers
to purchase DVDs, the Internet also provides a
distribution method for alternative or independent fictional
films and documentaries. The technical and economic
advantages of digitization and online distribution
have benefited academics and researchers through the
availability of digitized film archives like the Library of
Congress Paper Print Collection and the Internet
Archive’s Movie Archive, which includes the Prelinger
Archives. The Internet also serves as a significant medium
of distribution for multimedia art, Flash movies, film
parodies, home movies or videos, and animated political
cartoons. In addition, the distribution and sale of pornographic
films and videos online totaled over $1 billion in
2005 and comprised a large portion of total Internet filesharing
volume.
Due to technical limitations of bandwidth and connection
speeds as well as legal obstacles surrounding the
Internet rights to distribute Hollywood films, the independent
‘‘short’’ has become one of the most common
categories of film distributed online, including a large
selection of animated shorts. One of the most popular
sites for viewing online films is AtomFilms.com, which
launched ‘‘AtomFilms Studio’’ in January 2006 to fund
independent producers looking to create short films specifically
for Internet broadband distribution. In 2005, in
addition to streaming content, AtomFilms.com’s major
competitor, IFILM.com, expanded its distribution methods
to deliver video-on-demand (VOD) to cellular smartphones
and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
In 2001 BMW premiered its eight-part online promotional
series of big-budget, short action films titled
The Hire, made by such established international film
directors as David Fincher, John Frankenheimer, Ang
Lee, Guy Ritchie, Kar Wai Wong, Alejandro González
Iñárritu, and John Woo, and such stars as Clive Owen,
Stellan Skarsga˚rd, Madonna, Forest Whitaker, and Gary
Oldman. On its Website, BMW boasted that the films
had been viewed over 100 million times before they were
removed from the site in 2005, despite the fact that the
films were released on DVD in 2003.
Although technical and infrastructural obstacles
related to bandwidth and video quality and size may be
overcome, Internet copyright issues, Internet distribution
rights, and Internet release time ‘‘windows’’—which traditionally
go from theaters, video/DVD, pay-per-view,
premium cable, network television, and basic cable—
have also complicated online distribution. For instance,
the major rights holders (that is, Hollywood studios and
entertainment conglomerates) have prevented companies
like Netflix from shifting their distribution and rental
methods to on-demand streaming and downloading over
the Web, although the online DVD-by-mail rental service
is still one of the more profitable Web ventures,
ending 2005 with about 4.2 million subscribers and sales
approaching $1 billion.
Responding to increased consumer demand, and in
response to the fact that only 15 percent of worldwide
Hollywood film revenues come from box-office profits,
and that two-thirds of the income for the six major
studios now comes from the home theater divisions, the
majors have begun to pursue their own online distribution
options by offering feature-length films already
available on DVD for legal downloading, including
MovieLink (http://www.movielink.com), a joint venture
of MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner
Bros.; and CinemaNow (http://www.cinemanow.com),
financed in part by Lions Gate and Cisco Systems. In
December 2005, Apple Computer also began to distribute
animated short films from Pixar (co-owned by Apple
CEO Steve Jobs), Disney-ABC television programs, and
music videos through its popular iTunes music download
service. While no feature-length films are included in
26 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM