Start-Up Plans to Show Mini-Movies on Web

Film and animation shorts, those quirky but often powerful pieces sandwiched between feature films at film festivals, will find a broad, new audience on the Web if a Seattle start-up has its way.

Atom Corp., which has spent recent months acquiring rights to dozens of short films, will announce today that it has reached distribution agreements with @Home, Warner Bros. Online, Go Network/Infoseek and more traditional outlets such as HBO and Continental Airlines.

The company will also launch a new Web site (https://www.atomfilms.com), where it will show a new selection of shorts each week. The site will also offer clips of video shorts customers can view before buying a video of the entire short online.

Atom founder Mika Salmi, a former executive at RealNetworks, estimates that 10,000 film and animation shorts are made worldwide each year. He figures about 5% of those, many of them comedies, would be interesting to a general audience.

Salmi said his goal is to build Atom into the premier brand name associated with shorts by broadly distributing the films and by creating a community of fans that come to its Web site regularly to watch and discuss shorts.

The low quality of online video when streamed to the average modem could be a problem for Atom. Salmi believes, however, that many customers will watch the films during their lunch hours at work, where they may have high-speed access. The growing popularity of high-speed cable modems will also help.