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"Here's a category [short films] that has been under-marketed and not seen by a lot of the public," Salmi explains over a burger and fries at the Bob's Big Boy in Burbank, Calif. (The restaurant gained minor fame in the indie film business when, early in his career, David Lynch reputedly had a chocolate shake at this Bob's every day for four years.) We are a couple blocks from the offices of Warner Bros. Online, which recently joined former Universal Pictures chief Frank Biondi and Arts Alliance in London to invest in Salmi's company. "People are in a very active environment on the Web," says Salmi, a tall Finn who was previously a business development executive at streaming media company RealNetworks. "They're leaning forward toward the computer, not leaning back on their couch with a clicker. They want things that are going to be very quick."

The Web may just be the perfect medium for distributing short films. Shorts are brief enough (most on the Web are under 10 minutes) to be interspersed between other activities like answering e-mail or tasks like paying bills. They are accessible on demand. And most importantly, online distributors see greater financial possibilities for shorts online -- where they earn revenues through advertising, sponsorship, licensing fees and e-commerce partnerships -- than in admission-paying movie houses. "Distributing a film over the Web is cheaper by an order of magnitude," says Rodger Raderman, founder of the iFilm Network, an online film distributor and community site. "Where traditionally a film might require 100,000 viewers to realize a profit, by using the Web that same film might achieve profitability with 10,000 viewers."

Back in your grandma's day, shorts were a mainstay of the local movie house -- the preferred appetizer before the main course in American cinemas. (Movie trailers provide the foreplay these days.) But movie shorts, and short entertainment formats in general, were driven out of the U.S. entertainment scene not by changing tastes so much as economics. In the music world, 45s were popular in the '50s and '60s, until record companies realized they could make more money selling albums. Similarly, Hollywood studio chiefs found that feature films were easier to market and drew larger crowds to theaters. "The motion picture model was developed on a feature format," Salmi explains. "There wasn't an economic model for short films."

And, while short films do air occasionally on cable TV, they are practically nonexistent on network television. Shorts are unpopular with network executives, who believe that TV audiences like familiar premises and recurring characters. It's a lot easier to brand a show like "Friends" than a program with new personalities and stories each week. ("Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" are famous exceptions.) While Salmi and others believe we will see more shorts on cable TV in the future, it remains the case that short films have largely been ghettoized on the film festival circuit, less an art form than a calling card for aspiring filmmakers.

Ironically, the fact that short films fail to fit into traditional entertainment business models is the very reason why they have become such a hot item in the emerging online entertainment world.

Next page | Are we heading toward "image literacy?"