Internet Focus For New Film Studio

As the Internet has become the people's stage and online video surges in popularity, AtomFilms is launching what could be among the first of many new studios dedicated to the production of video for online audiences.

The Internet video pioneer, which already runs a Web site for pre-produced video shorts or clips from independent creators, plans to keep banking on those projects, which it calls "atom-ized" pieces. But with AtomFilms Studio, it will finance select projects, investing upfront in the production of original content designed for Internet-based delivery.

The development house has six projects under production already - due for release in the spring - and as many as three dozen others planned for the studio's first year. The initial round ranges from a Craigslist-inspired online dating reality series to a short film about a man who finds himself fighting for his life after a successful date.

Parent company Atom Entertainment Corp. plans to invest "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in the initiative in 2006, with budgets per project expected to vary widely, said AtomFilms' founder and CEO Mika Salmi.

"AtomFilm Studio is a development program for us to create content that will be on Internet, mobile and television. It will all be short-form content, so everything will be under five minutes", said AtomFilms founder and CEO Mika Salmi, in an interview with CBS News Technology Analyst Larry Magid.

"We're hoping to create from two to four dozen of these this year – it's going to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars," said Salmi. "Individual films will range form a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars."

But will it sell?

"Now that Apple is selling video through iTunes for the new iPods and Google has its own video store, a lot of people are scrambling to create video that people can pay for to watch on small devices including iPods and even cell phones," said Magid.

"There are now a lot of portable devices," said Magid, "including many cell phones and the new version of the iPod that can play video, but they're not very good for watching a full-length movie and what people want are short subjects. These devices have rekindled the interest in short films."

Click here to check out Larry Magid's podcast interview
of AtomFilms founder and CEO Mika Salmi.

Atom hopes its roots dating back to 1999 will give it a jump in the latest online video rush, which has attracted deep-pocketed rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and CBS Corp.

In the early days of AtomFilms, the San Francisco-based startup and other Web sites such as Icebox.com and Pop.com struggled to gain niche viewers with poor-quality, mostly amateur video played over slow Internet connections. The dot-com bust then dashed a number of grand ambitions to produce original content for the Web.

But times have changed. Video quality and computers have improved. More people have faster Internet connections and are turning to the Web as a source of entertainment.