Social network expected to launch biggest ever short film contest MySpace are set to make a major marketing push to independent filmmakers in the next week with the a new short film prize. Provisionally titled ‘MyMovieMashup’ the contest will be open to short filmmakers, offering a £1m feature film budget to the winner and guaranteed distribution in 2008 through UK distr…

The BBC has announced plans to start distributing its programmes for free across the filesharing network Azuerus. While the programmes available - which includes Red Dwarf, Little Britain, Doctor Who and possibly Monty Python - will be free, the files will still be DRM encrypted. The news comes after the founders of one of the most popular filesharing programmes (KaZaA) and the Skype mess…

"This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person." In a somewhat gimmicky yet touching move, Time Magazine's famous (and sometimes infamous - see Hitler in 1938) Person of the Year awards has named us, the general blogging, vlogging, myspacing, youtubin…

The worldwide phenomenon of viral videos has been recognised with the launch of the world's first ever weekly Viral Video Chart - which checks over 2 million blogs daily for videos that bloggers have linked to or embedded.

Google's first international partner for shared video, email and content provision is BSkyB, with whom the search giant is building a broadband platform for the UK. Days after BT announced its entry into the TV/Broadband area, the UK's largest pay-TV provider 39% owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and run by his son Lachlan has announced it will offer user-created video content on…

In an impressive display of cooperation, over 3,000 human rights groups around the world have been working together to share resources and develop a catalogue of human rights abuses. Huridocs, the name of the collaboration, whose members include Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, this week announced it had set up a search engine - Hurisearch - to better explore the 2.5 million pages…

Watch Aliens Attack Asia at last using 21st century film distribution methods THE ALIEN INVASION Digital Launch is a 21st century film distribution platform that will involve the free distribution and screening of Singapore's 1st and only Golden Horse Awards (The Chinese Oscar) nominated short film on all available major digital mediums, by capitalizing on the available technological…

Current.tv, a pioneer of user-generated web content, unique in having an accompanying cable channel in the US has apparently turned a 'small profit' according to Derek Baine, a senior analyst with Monterey-based Kagan Research. The Al Gore backed network does not boast anywhere near the viewing figures of YouTube, but has an accompanying cable channel piped to 30 million US homes…

After a strong first week on the new iTunes Movies service, with  over 125,000 paid downloads, Disney chief Bob Iger has said he expects the company to make at least $50m on the service in its first year. In the same week that a Disney subsidiary has begun to experiment with allowing unencrypted downloads of an upcoming artists' album as an MP3 (ie files without Digital Rights Man…