With the introduction of high-bandwidth cabling to all of our homes we will have hundreds of different programmes at our fingertips.  At the touch of a button we can watch pet dogs being rescued and our neighbours winning a million pounds, or not as the case may be.  But is this really what we want?

Over the next few years our home entertainment systems are set to become more integrated, with our television and Internet connections occupying the same space in the corner of our living room. We are told that this is only a matter of time.  Convergence is set to happen not only in terms of entertainment, but also in terms of ordering our groceries.  Within the next few years we will all be able to order pizza, our summer holidays and even do our weekly shop from the comfort of our armchairs.

All of this sounds really exciting; all that choice, all those channels - but doesn’t it also sound familiar?  It’s not that long ago that we were being offered the world in terms of deregulation of the airwaves.  The promise of cable television; programmes produced ‘by the people for the people’.  It never happened.  When Maggie deregulated the broadcasting industry she gave cable operators carte blanche to take over, without the need to support the infrastructure necessary for the provision of local television.  With the exception of a few local workshops the dream of putting the means of (television) production into the hands of ordinary filmmakers, never mind the ‘woman on the street’, amounted to naught.

We are told that the Internet is set to become another distribution medium for the same inane plethora of fast-cutting, fast moving, real-life accident and emergency docu-soaps, and Hollywood romantic comedies that are fed to us today; only with even more choice.  Alternatively we could be at that space in time where there is a chink in the consumerism of creativity and we are, in fact, at the brink of a new unique art form?

It goes without saying that some of the major entertainment conglomerates of the western world would be fighting over themselves to establish their presence in the emerging arena of entertainment delivery via the Internet.

More pertinent is the subtle behaviour that accompanies our surfing on the Internet; that of interactivety.  We are no longer expected to sit passively, expectantly, waiting for the entertainment we have been promised to drop in our lap.  We are now actively encouraged to seek it ourselves.  This interactivety exists currently in the form of games, often used by web sites to keep you at their site, and coming back for more, currently known as ‘sticky content’.  It also occupies a more subtle and more pervasive position than that.  The interactivety so extensively promoted exists in the approach that we now have to our choice of entertainment.  For the first time in history we are turning our televisions off in favour of the interactive, self-determining experience of ‘surfing’.  It is through this active behaviour of choosing our areas of interest that we ultimately shape our own entertainment.  If we have an interest in reading articles about the construction of small bi-planes out of tissue paper we can now search for, and sometimes find, what we are looking for.  We can even enter into conversations with other people anywhere in the world about our particular obsessions.

For the independent filmmaker the potential of the Internet as a distribution medium is very exciting.  Since the inception of filmmaking ‘the means of production’ have slowly but surely become more accessible to the individual filmmaker.  Video was a major shift enabling independents to make films at a fraction of the cost when using film, although with broadcast quality edit suites costing upwards of £200 per day, it was still a rich woman’s pastime.  Even if the filmmaker could afford all of this, there was still the hurdle of getting the film shown to large audiences.  This has proven to be the largest hurdle of all to the independent filmmaker.  With the users of the World Wide Web increasing every day the independent filmmaker has the possibility of reaching a potential audience of millions around the globe.

There are, however, various implications associated with putting traditional films on the internet.  Firstly, there are the technological limitations concerned with conveying such large amounts of data over a limited bandwidth network.  This is only transitory though; these problems will be overcome with the introduction of ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) and the increase of ISDN (Information Services Digital Network) and similar technologies.  The second is far more interesting.  This surrounds the implications in terms of aesthetics, in putting films intended for viewing on television or at the cinema, onto our computers. 

Despite being a new medium for the majority of the population, computers have very quickly established expectations in terms of their use.  Without a detailed study of the user it is safe to say, that in general, our use of a computer is more interactive and directive than that of our cinema or television habits (although the push to alter our television viewing is coming from supporters of interactive and digital television).  Whilst the Internet seems a perfect device for creating hype about a film, through the use of trailers, fan-sites, screen-savers etc., it isn’t ideal for the purveyance of a one and a half hour, intimate, family drama.  What it is possible to imagine is an abundance of new forms devised specifically for viewing on the internet.  This could involve pieces that last for only thirty seconds at a time but are delivered to your desktop over a period of a week, or it could mean that we download films that sit on our desktop and loop, and when we feel like a break we just ‘look in’ or a five minute animation. 

The creative potential for this new medium is enormous and exciting.  There is, however, very little work currently being created with the specific intention of showing it on the Internet alone.  One can only guess at the possible reasons for this.  One possible reason could be the current difficulties involved in making a film and putting it on the Web.  The filmmaker needs to be conversant with many different forms of technology including computers, digital editing packages, compression algorithms, Web Design etc.  Secondly, and more importantly few filmmakers have as yet realised the creative possibilities for defining this new and unique art form. 

Most filmmakers remain obsessed with the Hollywood Dream:  with their sights set on World Domination through Schmultz.  If what they really want is to make moving image pieces and have them viewed by the world then they need look no further than the possibilities offered by the Internet.  It will mean a period of experimentation, of feeling around in the dark.  One advantage of this could mean a return to the early days of cinema experimentation, a revisiting of previous experiments in structure and form, a chance to view again work by people such as Len Lye, Maya Deren or even Vertov.  Another advantage would be the possibility to create work outside the studio system, outside the traditional values and means of production: a chance to make films for specific, minority audiences.  None of this will happen automatically.  But what we have at this current moment in time is ‘the possibility’.  For the first time in a hundred years filmmakers can really say “what if….”