The concept behind short-film channel Movieola was not about the multi-platform power of the short. Au contraire. Its launch in the 2002 broadcast season actually predated the ability to deliver film over the Internet in any meaningful way. At the time, motion picture on the web was slow and clunky, and the resolution grainy.

‘At that point we thought TV was the only game in town,’ says Cal Millar, VP and GM of Movieola parent company Channel Zero, which also owns Silver Screen Classics – like Movieola, a Category 2 digital channel.

Instead, cofounder Romen Podzyhun had an a-ha moment, in which he realized that shrinking attention spans and compressed time schedules spelled opportunity for a new channel.

‘Here’s a niche in the market that has not been well-served – time-strapped people looking for exposure to films they’d never seen before from all genres – a miniature The Movie Network or Movie Central,’ says Millar.

Now that the Internet has caught up with Movieola, will it launch the channel into orbit or spike the business its executives have so painstakingly developed?

The upside when Movieola launched was that content was relatively cheap, since there was very little interest in shorts from other broadcasters, and thus little competition. The challenge was – and remains – marketing.

‘We’re dealing with films that have not had multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to raise awareness,’ notes Millar. And because Movieola doesn’t have the might of a larger integrated broadcaster, it can’t cross-promote.

Although the channel is available through the likes of Bell ExpressVu, Cogeco, Rogers and Telus, it hasn’t been able to negotiate carriage on Shaw and Star Choice.

‘We’ve never been able to get in front of them to make the pitch, even though there’s a fishing network, a fight network, and Wild TV,’ says Millar. ‘Maybe they’re not film lovers. All I’d like is the opportunity to go out and try to convince them.’

Nevertheless, Movieola has soldiered on, relying on word of mouth and grassroots and guerrilla marketing campaigns for a slow build. And while ad revenue has been slow in coming, Movieola has built a subscriber base of one million-plus and has, for several years, turned a modest profit.

The explosion of shorts online has turned out to be both a godsend and a curse for Movieola, notes director of programming Shane Smith. There is a much higher awareness of shorts, but many viewers are acquainted only with the gross-out humor favored by user-generated YouTube-type fare, and don’t realize that short film can be serious art of professional quality. And many don’t have the attention span for longer shorts of, say, 10 or 20 minutes.

‘I think that the interest in online short-form content has had a halo effect in the broadcast arena,’ says Catherine Tait, principal at shorts producer and distributor iThentic.com. ‘In the past, you’d be lucky to get shorts on the CBC or a specialty channel. They were really used as filler, but with the advent of YouTube, broadcasters are thinking there is an appetite, and that’s very good for filmmakers.’

Just as naysayers were bearish on Movieola’s prospects on TV, they argue that now that short film has become de rigeur online, no one’s going to want to turn on the TV for it anymore, says Millar. But he believes the two mediums are complementary, using the analogy that having an iPod doesn’t make the radio less attractive. ‘I still need exposure to music I haven’t heard before,’ he says.

Movieola’s website (www.movieola.ca) offers some of its programming. Recent works featured online range from the live-action six-minute The Slap (‘All he wanted was a kiss; she wanted something more’) to the one-minute animation The Expectant Mother.

In addition to its own web moves, Movieola has struck some high-profile – if not yet lucrative – deals. The channel launched online at Joost.com in the summer, and Millar says that instead of counting viewers by the hundreds or thousands, they’re getting tens of thousands of hits daily.

Most promisingly, Movieola has partnered with Hulu, the long-awaited new website built by NBC Universal and Fox to take on the YouTubes of the world. Movieola is supplying Hulu with an advertiser-supported, dedicated version.

‘We’re very excited about the launch,’ says Millar. ‘We’ll be able to advertise on those very places we’ve never been able to cross-promote to before, like Spike, Fox TV, and their channels.’

So given that Movieola is about to become available to a mass audience online in the U.S. and around the world, perhaps it’s time that the folks at Shaw and Star Choice took a call?