Worth checking out;

No definite dates yet, but the 8th edition of courtisane festival will take place end of april 2009. And here's the call for entry... You can send your film/project to Courtisane. The submission form and regulations can be found on www.courtisane.be ! The submission deadline is 31 december 2008.

Legendary cult director David Lynch slams films on mobile phones;

"It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your f***ing telephone… get real!"

So say technology company Alcatel-Lucent ;

The British internet TV market could generate revenues of £1.78bn by 2011...Alcatel-Lucent claims internet TV services could have a market share of between 22 and 37 per cent in the UK within three years, depending on how aggressively they are promoted. The findings were calculated by the number of people who said they would like to use the services and the amount they were willing to pay.

It is very interesting to note the slow (but sure) change in how large media companies react to YouTube - from complaining and asking for items to be removed, to now asking for a cut of the ad revenues ;

In the last few months, CBS, Universal Music, Lionsgate, Electronic Arts and other companies have stopped prodding YouTube to remove unauthorized clips of their movies, music videos and other content and started selling advertising against them.
...
"We don’t want to condone people taking our intellectual property and using it without our permission," said Curt Marvis, the president of digital media at Lionsgate Entertainment, which owns films like 'Dirty Dancing' and the 'Saw' series of horror movies, "But we also don’t like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content.” he said. “For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it."

Echo's of the PotterWar saga ? 

Joss Whedon, creator of TV dramas such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's new creation 'Doctor Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog ' is being touted as a possible TV-meets-Web Film model ;

It is a TV show that has never been shown on TV, an internet video that looks nothing like an internet video. It was made for the fun of it, not for ratings or profit, and put on the web in the hope that someone would notice. The fact that they did, in their millions, has delivered a shock to the Hollywood system, raising the spectre of writers, directors and actors bypassing major producers and selling directly to audiences online.