So the future has fallen upon us and everyone is getting very excited about films online. We should however not flinch from the stinging rebuke that lurks in the fact that it took some years before anyone thought they could make a business work selling shorts online.

To be fair I guess echoes of the dotcom boom still cause distant shudders in the minds of most people looking to sink money into ebusinesses. I well remember the wave of websites that sprung up at the same time as Shooters which fully intended to draw audiences with what where then postage stamp size quick time files which’d take most users longer to download than to watch. However you don’t have to go too far back into the archives of this blog to find my complaints about how the only way people thought they could monetise short film content was through advertising. For some years now we have had a plethora of sites offering live streaming film content but it was always free to view and buffered by advertising and generally the message was that as creators of the work we should all be very grateful to have the opportunity to put our films in front of the browsing billions.

So after a couple of failed experiments with other platforms and a complicated plan to sell downloads ourselves via paypal, Chris and I were delighted when Brighton based MiShorts came galloping over the horizon. The landing page is not so dissimilar to other film sites and there is plenty of work that is free to view, indeed every film is free to watch twice. However once you’ve seen it twice premium content then can be downloaded in HD quality usually at the cost of one pound sterling (though some longer films are more like one pound thirty, which is like two dollars. Once downloaded the film is yours for life.

On top of their ever growing catalogue of short films, MiShorts offers its users a focus on the best new content, VODcast interviews with directors (look out for Chris and I next month) and a comprehensive “toolbox” of helpful links for people exploring the UK filmmaking scene.

Though there is foreign content the site is resoundingly British but I guess we all have to start somewhere and this country certainly needs a resource like MiShorts. The user experience is clean and efficient and they’ve got around the lack of an embeddable player with their “MiDget”, an embeddable info panel which, when activated opens up a lightbox window showing the film or trailer you’ve clicked on. This panel, which displays all of a filmmaker’s work with MiShorts automatically updates too…

It’s an attractive and professional looking way of having your work online that offers good value for the audience whilst maintaining the moral link between the artist and their income.