For a 12-month trial period, the BBC is offering high-resolution downloads on its BBC Film Network site. (Note: the site, which launched at the London Film Festival last November, aims to promote new British filmmakers by screening short films and profiling the people who make them. It showcases three new films each week as broadband streams, and now has a library of over 200 shorts, including dramas, documentaries, animations and more. According to the BBC, the site receives over 60,000 visitors per month and has over 5,000 registered members.) The new feature is enabled by an application which is being offered to 10,000 visitors to the site on a first-come-first-served basis, and which allows viewing of a selection of short films in full-screen mode in near-DVD quality. Users can also subscribe, free of charge, to automatically download three new high-resolution short films every two weeks (six films are available for download through the application at any one time) and to be alerted whenever new films are ready to watch. The application is based on technology from Kontiki and ioko that is similar to the technology that underpinned the BBC’s recent Integrated Media Player (iMP) trial: it uses a legal peer-to-peer network to deliver films as high-quality video files, and uses DRM software to provide end-users with a license to view each film for 28-days, after which the film’s file will automatically remove itself from their hard drives.
The first short films to be offered via the new application are "How to Tell if a Relationship is Over" (stars Julian Barratt of "The Mighty Boosh), "Fishy" (an "aquatic romance," starring Shirley Henderson), and the Chris Shepherd animation, "Dad’s Dead." The BBC says that, by offering short films with a picture quality comparable to that of DVD’s, it aims to "test the audience’s appetite for British-made short films and also test broadband as a viable platform for showcasing new film content." "In the free-for-all that is the Internet, how the audience experiences film content on the Web is key, as are their expectations in terms of the quality of video content," Gerard O’Malley, the BBC’s interactive executive for film, said in a prepared statement. "We are here to back British filmmaking talent and bring their work to an as wide an audience as possible. That’s why BBC Film Network is running this trial, to test the reaction and appetite of our audience to high-quality short films on-demand."
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