First-Ever Online New England Film Festival

Film makers, your audience awaits.

Entries are sought now for the first-ever Online New England Film Festival, presented by NewEnglandFilm.com.

Planned to be an annual event, filmmakers can choose from the following categories: animation, children/family, comedy, documentary, and drama. Showcase launch of selected films is Sept. 1, 2009 through Oct. 16, 2009.

The films will be selected by NewEnglandFilm.com staff and a festival jury.

In addition, festival organizers partnered with Women in Film Video New England to jury a special category New England Women Above the Line for films under 30 minute produced, directed, or written by a woman, or women based in New England.

During the online festival, viewers will be able to post comments on films, share films with friends, and vote on favorites.
An awards ceremony and screening will take place the weekend of Oct. 17, 2009 in Boston, Mass.

In 2006, Connecticut established a tax credit to bolster the in-state film industry by allowing productions spending at least $50,000 to receive a credit on up to 30% of their costs on all goods, services, and labor. Consult the official Digital Media and Motion Picture Tax Credit Guidelines for a list of eligibility requirements.

Information Wealth, Targeted Growth

Inside the new J.P. Morgan Global Equity Research report Nothing But Net: Outlook for Global Internet Stocks is the prediction that the mostly performance-based U.S. search ad market will rise "10 percent in 2009 to nearly $16 billion. In contrast, display ads, which includes both performance and branded advertising, will grow only 6.3 percent to $8.4 billion this year."

"Yahoo! is particularly well positioned to provide targeted advertising to a network, in our view. As one of the top-ranked websites by unique visitors (according to comScore), Yahoo! has a wealth of information about visitor habits and preferences.

"We also think it will take time for generalized non-targeted inventory to catch up to the monetization of targeted premium inventory."

Online video ad growth is on the brink of healthy gains in 2009. But, unlike television, which still can count on advertisers to respond to CPMs (advertising bought on the basis of impressions), online video can't guarantee viewership for any specific video the way TV does. (Holding up growth are factors such as uneven quality and copyright issues.)

One model to watch is Google experiments with how to monetize YouTube videos. A viewer searches, then watches a favorite tune video, then can click on a link to buy that song or related product from Amazon or iTunes or others, with a percentage going to YouTube.