MTV leading in Internet Short Film Site Acquisitions

One sign of the increasing viability of short films as a medium gaining traction as a separate genre rather than just a path to feature film making is the consolidation of online short film sites under large corporate media umbrellas:

Viacom's MTV has acquired the two leading purveyors of short films online. It has purchased both iFilm.com (which it bought last year) and Atom Entertainment, which has four sites including Atomfilms.com. It bought Atom for $200 million, which should indicate that short video online is becoming a very viable medium indeed.

The deal Al Gore's Current TV -- another short film venue -- just made with Yahoo is yet another sign pointing to the emergence of short films and videos as one of the major media forms of the future.

This trend will only increase with the proliferation of portable devices capable of showing short films, the movement of the Internet to online everywhere status, and the increasing availability of digital filmmaking equipment that can turn anyone seriously interested into a filmmaker.