The Sundance Film Festival on iTunes and YouTube

It’s old news that the Sundance Film Festival has gone corporate. Some still protest that fact.
Others accept it, seeing it as an unavoidable reality in an era when even our sports stadiums bear corporate names. And yet still others choose to focus on the good that comes along with the bad. One upside to the corporatization of Sundance is the slick media that the festival organizers have made freely available on iTunes this year. Since the festival started on January 18th, Sundance has released a series of video podcasts on iTunes that feature directors and screenwriters talking candidly about their newly released films. Most of these videos run 3-4 minutes in duration. However there are a couple offerings that last a good hour. Generally speaking, you’ll want to have a nice broadband connection to make these downloads fairly quick and painless, and, from there, you can either sync them to your iPod, or just watch them on your desktop with iTunes (you can download iTunes for free here).

Separately, iTunes is also making available for a small fee ($1.99 each) a total of 32 short films that have been presented at this year’s festival. But, let us offer you this small tip: these videos can be streamed at no cost from the Sundance web site.

Finally, on to YouTube. The poster child of the Web 2.0 movement, YouTube has created a channel dedicated to the Sundance festival. And here visitors can find daily video coverage of the festival, interviews with filmmakers, and video blogs that capture the festival experience from the vantage point of independent filmmakers. To give you a feel for what you’ll find in the YouTube channel, we’ve posted a sample video, which features filmmaker Arin Crumley reviewing (with some salty language, hence caveat emptor) the short films shown on Day 2 of the festival: