Coming to a computer screen near you

Cliff Stanford has made one fortune by bringing the Internet to the mass market, through Demon Internet, and now he would like to make another by using the Net to deliver movies.

Last week, the Redbus Film Group, of which Mr Stanford is chairman, said it had secured the rights to some notable films, but the two-year-old film-distribution company will not launch an Internet service until high-speed access is more widely available.

Not everyone is waiting. There's already a fast-growing market for what the traditional media business calls "video on demand", but the Net knows as "streaming media".

The Net cannot yet deliver what Stanford wants - "fullscreen 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 do not mind watching a screen image the size of a credit card, the Internet already has lots to offer.

It is being 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. But if you're expecting a television-like experience, you'll be disappointed."

But this is just the start of a development that could change the industry, and some of the major players have noticed. Film industry hotshots Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg think streaming video has, in the latter's words, "unlimited potential": their company, DreamWorks, is working with Imagine Entertainment on a site called Pop.com, which is expected in the spring. Warner Bros Online is also exploring Webbased video through its Entertaindom site, launched late last year. Others will follow.

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 is really the Internet that has changed the picture. Thanks to the Net, movies that would not normally be seen outside a film festival are now available to a global audience.

In fact, the Net 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 .

It is a somewhat arty market, but Mr Cornish says this reflects the demographics of the Net, which is skewed towards young males. "It also reflects what's available: the big entertainment companies are not putting their movies on the Internet, so you're seeing alternative forms of content. Having said that, we've got the best British content at Atomfilms including several Bafta award winners and Nick Park's Aardvark films. . ."

In the US, at least, the Net has been adopted by experimental film-makers, and the Binary Theatre specialises in student films. British independents and film students do not seem to have taken their chance. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, for example, runs Uncut, a series of monthly meetings for up-and-coming film-makers, but Christine Atha of the ICA's education department says the Internet has not made any impact so far. She couldn't think of anyone who had put a film online.

Nor could Eric Janssen at the London International Film School, "the oldest film school in the world". He said: "none of our students are doing it at the moment - the technology is moving way too fast for us - but it won't be long now, that's for sure."

That is a shame because 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 Mr Cornish, "so film will disappear. It's happening at a speed far greater than people realise."

Gill Henderson, chief executive of the London Film and Video Development Agency (LFVDA), which has a £700,000 sterling (€113,400) budget to support independent film, video and television, 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. The changes digital technology will bring to the exhibition of films could in some ways be the most revolutionary part of the process.

"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," Mr 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, as with DVD, which makes it much more compelling. So broadband becomes the inflection point for really serious growth."

And when that happens, the film students, experimental movie makers and pop video directors who are attracting an audience on today's Web will have to compete with full length features made with big budgets and Hollywood production values.

Companies like Mr Stanford's Redbus InterNet Distribution will be on the Web selling streamed movies on a pay-per-view basis.

Mr 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.