Movies online: The future is (almost) here

For the better part of a decade, people like me have been pronouncing that theatrical motion-picture distribution, at least when it came to independent films, was going the way of the passenger pigeon and the daily print newspaper. (You won't believe this, kids, but somebody used to come to your house every single morning with a rolled-up log of paper wrapped in plastic and rubber bands!) Some mystical convergence of the Internet, cable TV, the hand-held SmartHooble and other, yet-to-be-invented networks and devices would open the doors to a hellish new Nirvana of unlimited, 24/7 hi-def cinema, from the most massive Hollywood spectacles to the most obscure art-house offerings.

Well, the future is here, sort of. And as usual with the future, it's not a yes-or-no proposition. Online movie delivery has exploded in the last year, at least compared to its virtual nonexistence before that. Within a few clicks from this page, you could be watching a documentary about barehanded fishing in Oklahoma, the Soviet-era magic-realist classic "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" or "Hotel for Dogs." Come September, Sally Potter's new film "Rage" will premiere as a series of episodes on Babelgum, at the same time it's released in theaters and on DVD. The Palestinian film "Laila's Birthday," an international festival favorite with no theatrical deal, was recently made available for three weeks on the Auteurs, a new cinephile streaming site that's currently in beta.

Those are just examples; I could pick dozens more. But online distribution remains an insignificant factor in the film economy (if anything, movie theaters are thriving in the current recession), and it represents a tiny proportion of the video watched on computer screens. One could argue, in fact, that feature films and the Internet are mismatched forms of media; the former demands long stretches of undivided attention while the latter thrives on multitasking, rapid response time and brief info-bursts. When was the last time you spent 90 minutes or more sitting at your computer and looking at the same thing?

Still, more and more movies are available online every month, and new modes of delivering them seem to crop up almost as fast. Last October marked a turning point of sorts. That was when YouTube streamed the week-long premiere of indie pioneer Wayne Wang's "The Princess of Nebraska" (as a companion piece to his theatrical release, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers") and Hulu streamed its first full-length feature, the George W. Bush-related documentary "Crawford."

Those examples represent one model for online distribution: streaming video-on-demand, or VOD, that's free to the user and best understood as a promotional opportunity for the filmmaker and distributor. In the case of Hulu, some advertising revenue presumably flowed back to the makers of "Crawford" -- probably in the range of a few cents per viewer -- but the real value lay in getting the movie out to a large audience during an election season. (A Hulu source reports that "Crawford" remains the most-discussed video in the site's history.) YouTube's Screening Room site is not ad-supported, but Wang's film got 153,000 views in a week, far more eyeballs than he could likely have gotten from a small-scale, bicoastal theatrical release. DVD and television deals followed, so quite possibly the experiment paid off.

Free VOD streaming definitely isn't the only game in town. There are three basic themes in digital distribution -- the other two, essentially, being online video rental (paid VOD streaming) and online video purchase (paid downloads) -- and many variations upon them. Some online exhibitors, including iTunes, Netflix, Amazon and IndiePix, try to enable various ways of leapfrogging their content over the Berlin Wall between your computer and your TV set. Others, including Hulu, Joost, Jaman and the Auteurs, deliver content to your laptop and leave the rest to you. Yes, I hear you, technophiles: It's easy to connect