The tireless observer will have noticed that over the past month or so I’ve been exploring some of the new online platforms that allow you to charge for your work. Most especially I’ve been dealing with the three outlets that my brother and I use, MiShorts, the Dynamo player and iTunes. But now that we finally have a series of workable, practical and efficient ways of bringing our films to an online market, what effect is that going to have on the way films are made and sold? Will downloads replace DVDs? Will short films finally find a commercial platform? Will this new platform, which makes it so much easier for filmmakers to sell direct to their audience, bring the old distribution model crashing to the floor and see us all able to turn a profit on much smaller budgets?

I think the answers to these questions are less surprising than the eager futurologist might assume, however they are nevertheless useful questions to think through.

So, will downloads replaced DVDs? It’s not crazy to assume they could. The VHS was killed by the DVD and already Downloads are defeating the CD so surely the days of the boxed set are as numbered as the discs within it. However for those fighting the cause of the Download there remains the problem of our deification of objects.

Anyone who visits my mate Adam is bound to realise that he’s not concerned about Commandments 1 and 2 because his movie collection clearly shows that he does worship another God and that whilst It truly resides in the darkness of the flicker theatre, these shiny plastic cases are his very own graven idols. No matter how much time software designers put into making graphic shelves to hold DVD box-like icons, a Download will never hold the sacred importance of a physical thing. Certain films I want to buy even when I own them already, I don’t, but it doesn’t take much to tempt me. This is a sensation I have yet to feel about a download.

Of course I was born in the last millennium so my thinking and my shopping responses were formed in a different age. Also whilst analogue media like vinyl albums and paperback books offer us a unique experience that the Download can imitate but never fully replace, the DVD does not. For the true fan a Download of Led Zeppelin is not the same as the plastic under the needle, but it is exactly the same as a CD. DVDs were never going to stop us going to cinema but for the vast majority of films, the vast majority of people are surely going to prefer to download the pleasure of viewing them, to buying all those pointless boxes.

But who wants a product that can only be sold once? Part of the reason the dirty “sequel” has evolved into the far more respectable “franchise” is that this means you can sell the film once on its own, then again in a box with its sequel and perhaps even a third time if you may be put it in a tin. The only difference is the box but it’s endlessly shocking how cheap a false sense of completeness can feel. Rather than letting Downloads destroy the DVD, the smart money is surely in finding ways to make Downloads provoke DVD sales. Here movies have an advantage over the CD since DVD sales have always been underpinned by attractive extra features.

Is a making of documentary and a handful of deleted scenes enough to keep DVD manufacturers in business? I admit it sounds thin and I’d love to think that one day content will triumph over frippery. But no matter how logical the argument is that people won’t continue to pay just to have a film in a box, I still think that the massed ranks of packaging designers will fight back. Even if just in the creation of boxes to put your media storage devices in. After all, what was it that really kicked off the Download revolution? The MP3 or the iPod?

Tomorrow I’m turning my thoughts specifically towards short film.