Pawtucket Film Festival to Go Online; The Pawtucket Film Festival Partners with Open Network Television to Launch First ''Filmcast''

Business Wire, Sept 9, 2005

PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- The 2005 Pawtucket Film Festival will broadly expand its audience by providing a simultaneous online version of the festival to be called the PFF Filmcast. With the PFF Filmcast, select films will be available for Internet viewing, allowing independent film fans around the world to experience and enjoy the works of the participating artists. By leveraging the same technology used by the rapidly growing field of podcasting, the Filmcast will be the first of its kind to usher in an era of accessible worldwide distribution for independent filmmakers.

Internet viewers will be able to access the PFF Filmcast at http://openvision.tv/pff. New films will be released and promoted throughout the festival in conjunction with their actual screening days. According to Rick Roth, festival founder and sponsor, "this technology gives us the opportunity to invite people from around the world to participate in the Pawtucket Film Festival and gives our filmmakers access to a broader audience than ever before."

The PFF is working with Open Network Television, LLC (ONTV) and their technology to enable to the online portion of the festival. Viewers who wish to participate in the Festival can go to http://openvision.tv/pff for instructions and will need ONTV's I/ON Console or other compatible media aggregator for an optimal viewing experience. The Filmcast will utilize RSS syndication feeds and the BitTorrent protocol to enable the automatically delivery of high-resolution formats of the films directly to viewer's MacOS or PC computers. I/ON leverages Apple's just-released QuickTime 7 technology to playback compressed high resolution files. Viewers will also be able to view lower-resolution versions of the films right from within their web browser.

As a part of the PFF Online, select filmmakers will be making their work available under copyright licenses generated by the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) giving them a "flexible range of protections and freedoms" to utilize in their digital distribution. Nathanial Freitas, co-founder of ONTV, says, "In the same way digital music is changing the way musical artists share their work, filmmakers are seeing the value of completely new distribution models that connect them with viewers and demonstrate the trust they share with their audience." The PFF Online will also utilize the Internet Archive (http://archive.org) and the Coral Content Distribution Network (http://coralcdn.org) for content hosting and distribution.

About The Pawtucket Mirror Image Film Festival: The PFF is currently in its sixth year. This year's festival runs from September 11 through the September 23, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. You can view this year's schedule at: http://www.mirrorimage.com/mi/filmfest05.html. Please contact Sarah Pace at bennapace@comcast.net for more information.

About Open Network Television, LLC: ONTV connects people with ideas. ONTV is committed to creating a sustainable commercial environment for the exchange of digital goods and promoting the freedom to share ideas embodied in digital content. With the I/ON Console, available under the GNU General Public License, the videos people want are delivered right to their desktop. Contact info@openvision.tv for more information.