You might be looking at the title of this article and you might be thinking that this will play out similar to other articles I wrote about movie theaters and movie trailers. You might believe that I'll go on and on about film festivals being a slowly dying relic of the past that's slowly being replaced by a service provided on the internet. However, you are only half right.

While internet streaming has supplanted many traditional film-going experiences, they haven't exactly been able to replicate the prestige of a traditional film festival. Film festivals carry the weight of an event and act as a showy spectacle that brings public attention to an independent film that may not have gotten it otherwise.

However, I have a feeling that future filmmakers will have had their beginnings on sites like YouTube. Film festivals bring a promising film attention and prestige, but YouTube is one of the best ways to share your film with as wide of an audience as possible. When you look at it, a low budget film has a better chance getting viewed on YouTube than it does trying to go through the difficult process to be presented at certain film festivals.

That having been said, YouTube is not without its glaring faults. YouTube allows anyone and everyone to add video content on it, which isn't always a good thing. In order to view the good stuff on YouTube you have to wade through a sea of mediocre, amateur, and down right bad videos from inexperienced people (not to mention thousands of racist, sexist, homophobic, and antisemitic videos that infect the site like a plague).

YouTube's biggest faults are both a lack of quality control and their disregard for content protected under Fair Use which has allowed larger corporations to remove videos from smaller content makers and cripple them financially. That person could have their entire YouTube channel taken down and have their independent films removed from the site as a result.

As you can see sites, such as YouTube have a long way to go if they ever want to supplant the festival circuit. However, I feel that these sites could be essential in the near future when it comes to finding new and innovative filmmakers. When most filmmakers start out, they usually lack the money and resources to get into a prestigious film festival. YouTube could act as the important first steppingstone toward a film festival.

Similar to how a popular independent film in a festival could lead to bigger Hollywood productions, a popular micro budget film could lead to slightly bigger independent films that get festival attention. So, YouTube hasn't quite replaced film festivals, in fact one could say they share a symbiotic relationship. Both are important platforms for distributing films, the only difference is that one has easier access toward distribution and the other has more prestige and respect in its distribution format. Hopefully the future will bring us a perfect hybrid of both.