This year, the Sundance Film Festival continues its eight-year tradition of presenting short films online and ups the ante by introducing additional platforms for distributing shorts - Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental source; iTunes, a platform for Sundance shorts launched in 2007; and Xbox LIVE.

Yes, that’s right: Xbox, the gaming console. Xbox LIVE is the company’s online entertainment service, which is accessible through an Ethernet connection that plugs into the Xbox 360 console. “It’s basically a platform for entertainment,” Xbox LIVE Global Marketing Manager Scott Nocas explained. “If you want to play Halo over and over, that’s great, we love that. And if you want to rent a movie or download an episode of South Park, we want to provide that opportunity for you as well.”

The shorts cost $1.99 each on both iTunes and Xbox, while Netflix is making the shorts available for its subscribers through its instant watching feature for no additional fee. (Netflix subscribers pay a monthly fee to access the company’s titles, both through the mail and streamed online.) All shorts will stay online until 2011.

The Festival is also continuing its long history of making shorts available on the Festival website. This year, 10 shorts will be streaming online for free – one short per day can be accessed for a period of 24 hours at www.sundance.org/festival during the 10 days of the Festival.

“Technology, above all else, allows filmmakers to find their audiences,” said Joe Beyer, Producer for Sundance Institute Online. This has never been more evident than in the past 12 months since the Sundance Film Festival launched its initiative with iTunes, which allows people at home to download-to-own Festival shorts. “I can say that the volume of the sales as a whole probably was bigger in 10 months than at the height of all the business that was being done for short films in the late nineties,” Beyer said. “So even during those banner years when Atom Films had just launched, the Sundance Channel and HBO were buying a lot of shorts, Delta Airlines was buying shorts for their in-flight entertainment … even at that time, I bet there were only 10 or 15 shorts a year that would ever get anything that would resemble a distribution deal, and even then it was very limited and for super low money.

“The fact that I can look back now and see what a big deal it was then, and then to see how iTunes has developed in 10 months, and see how many downloads have occurred, how many sales. … It’s kind of insane that it happened so quickly,” Beyer said.

Filmmaker Felipe Barbosa was among the filmmakers whose shorts went online last year. He’s pleased with the sales his film Salt Kiss did on iTunes – particularly because he didn’t do anything to promote it – but was even happier with what the exposure means for his career as a filmmaker. “I’m very glad my film is on iTunes,” he said. “It’s a very strong name. Every time I tell people who want to watch my short, ‘Just go to iTunes,’ it not only makes it much easier – I don’t have to make them a DVD – it looks good, it sounds good. It’s like a stamp of validation and credibility, which gives strength to the film. It’s a very respected platform.

“Also, there’s a cool feature in iTunes that really massages the filmmaker’s ego: anybody who watches your film can write a review,” he added. “So every now and again I go to the music store to check the reviews from random people that I don’t know and it’s always a pleasure to see somebody that I don’t know saying something positive about the film.”

“We never saw our role as trying to help develop that marketplace but essentially, that’s what we’ve done,” said Beyer. “And that goes to the heart of our mission, which is increasing the audience for independent cinema. Shorts are probably the most independent sub-genre of independent film. It’s where people experiment, they try new forms, new types of narrative, it’s always been the most experimental section, so the fact that that type of work has broken through means it’s a total sea shift.”