No one appears that outraged that the top festivals still demand a premiere for all the work they show. Nor do many people see this as a real problem. Instead of posturing and discord there is fantastic pragmatism with comment after comment basically saying that filmmakers tailor their distribution plans to suit the film. Some projects we know will never play Cannes, London or Edinburgh. For these the virtual world is a godsend, a chance for films to reach the audience they deserve. Yet when you make “one of those” shorts that you think could play in a big festival of course it makes sense to hold back from the internet and try and give it the platform and acclaim of playing a major festival.

This isn’t about longing for a red carpet moment, as Kate Taylor points out in her thoughtful and eloquent piece, short films are never about glamour. However if you think of the internet as a video store then festival garlands by the name of your film surely must carry at least as much weight as a glowing review on a DVD box. So if your film is of the type that plays well at festivals then give it a chance to play there first, if it’s a delightful piece of silliness, throw it the youtubing millions and feel the love. Or hate. Or indifference.

(a selection of comments we’ve had for our short film Free Speech… mmm, love you internet)

What’s perhaps more interesting is that the poll asks if you’ve uploaded in the past and asks if in the future an upload will be the natural first step. The question no one thought worth asking is if there was anyone out there who simply wasn’t considering it at all. I’d love to know if there are any directors or producers who don’t plan to upload their material at some point, even if that point is a couple of years hence after a successful trip round the festival circuit.

As it happens, I used to be such a director. I’m lucky and unfortunate enough to have been making films since, well if not quite before the internet, then at least long before the internet was a viable screening option. When my first film played Edinburgh in 1998 ISDN was the preserve of corporations and the idea of an internet connection fast enough to stream video was akin to telekinesis. A few years down the line and all that had changed. My brother and I had our own website and it was possible to download tiny quicktime files of most of our shorts. It was slow, the quality was low and whilst we did get some loving feedback from the faceless millions it never really seemed worth it. Not least because, financially, it wasn’t.

As our career in short films drew to a close (I’ve not made a short for anything except pure daft fun for four years), our online presence began to seem like a real mistake. We were selling DVDs of our short (but long) back catalogue and everything that was available for free seemed like a pointless dent in our hard fought for revenue stream. So we took the firm decision to remove ourselves from the internet – something which caused much astonishment and anger in many quarters. Surely we were cutting our selves off from an amazing potential audience? Why hold out for, at best, a couple of hundred quid’s worth of DVD sales when we could instead be putting our work in front of millions…? For me it was a simple matter of principle. We’d put money into making those films and the best of them are absolutely brilliant. If I give away the best of my work for free then it is clear what value I place on it.

But this is not the end of the story. Whilst you can still buy the 3 disc boxed set of all our work (including special features) you can now also watch all of my films online. Some, mainly the early ones, are free, others, mainly the best ones, using one of three pay-per-view services which I’ll be talking more about over the course of the week (or weeks depending how busy I get!) In every case the money you pay to watch each film is very small, less than most iPhone apps, but at least it is now possible offer our work at high quality to a vast audience and retain the principle that good work is worth paying for.

So this is the real question I’d love to have answered. It’s not whether to upload or not, or even when as I think we all have a pretty good idea of when each film is due it’s window. The real question is where do you upload? Youtube? Vimeo? Babelgum? Dailymotion? Shooting People? MiShorts? Dynamo? iTunes? Propeller? What are the benefits that you’ve found from these sources?