• by Shankar Gupta , May 2, 2005

AtomFilms Friday announced a partnership with Sony to provide mobile video content in the form of short films for the company's blockbuster portable entertainment device, the PlayStation Portable.

The three short films are some of AtomFilms' most popular offerings. They were put on the special PSP page, titled "the Mobile Movie Theater," last week, and have been downloaded for portable devices roughly 10,000 times, said Mika Salmi, AtomFilms' CEO. The company plans to step up promotion of the short films on the home page of its site, and also is in talks with Sony to possibly include the content with the PSPs for purchase, Salmi said.

The films are available to be streamed to a regular PC, or they can be downloaded in the MPEG4 format that the PSP uses for its video content. Videos streamed to PCs include a short ad for the PSP, which features the popular single "Take Me Out," by Franz Ferdinand. Both downloadable and streaming versions are free, however, and hosted on an AtomFilms page packed with PSP branding, ads, and a link to Sony's own PSP page.

The eclectic films, ranging from about 7 minutes to about 16 minutes in length, include "Football," which stars Helena Bonham Carter as the mother of a soccer-playing youth; "In God We Trust," which features a young man racing to do enough good deeds to escape being sent to Hell; and "Rockfish," a CGI short about a science-fiction fishing trip, that Vin Diesel's production company, One Race Productions, is developing into a feature film, staring Diesel as the voice of the main character. Salmi said these three films are just the initial slate, and that AtomFilms is watching the performance of the launch to decide whether to offer more PSP-formatted video files.

Salmi hopes that AtomFilms' portable downloads will strike the same chord with PSP users that music downloads strike with the millions of users of MP3 players. "People have gotten really habituated into downloading music and putting it onto their portable devices, so I think that movies isn't such a big step," he said.