Tropfest 2009 = Online Fail

Last year I was lucky enough to win a VIP seat from Sony to watch Tropfest. This year I thought I'd just catch them online than face the crowds. For those that don't know Tropfest it's the worlds biggest short film festival and is slowly taking over the world as it recently expanded to NY. So what about everyone that doesn't live in Sydney and wants to watch the winner and finalists online. Surly in 2009 you can enjoy them just as much as anyone. Nope sorry you have to contend with video that looks like it was designed in 1997 monitor sizes. Seriously WTF NineMSN! The banner is bigger than the bloody video! Also the winners were announced 24 hrs ago and they haven't updated the page with the winner. At least the official site was able to. Although they could use an image or a bold tag to help make it easier to read. Hey even a link tag would have helped. That aside I also think Tropfest has done a terrible job online promoting the finalists. I remeber seeing a rep from Tropfest talk about how in 2008 they will release the videos online (NineMSN) and they really do their best to help get the finalists and winners names out there. Check the winners page. Not even a bio, not a link to their site not a contact for any of the 16 finalists. Shit not even an image or a link to see the bloody video. Ahh I see all the effort went into the 100 sponsors pages. Luckily they all got linked up. Very important that QANTAS get that link traffic. As for the finalists well good luck with it all hopefully someone will google your name and you're not a Tim Dean, or Matt Wood. The winner Genevieve Clay might do OK with a unique name like that. Tropfest is also on Flickr (last photo updated Oct 2008) Tropfest is on Youtube but don't seem to grasp that last year's winner has reached 1M views in a month. Lets hope it doesn't take 9 months to update it again. I hope all of Tropfest's 29 Myspace friends got VIP seats as they are true champions. Only about 9 of them look to be real people. The Facebook page at least has some activity. It's quite sad that such a headline event with so much money behind it has done such a poor job online. Also what happened to Sony as a sponsor did it run its course. It was a great fit for Sony. Here's the trailer for Trop Fest 2009 And here is last year's winner. And I look forward to getting my Tropfest DVD in the newspaper next week to actually enjoy the videos. The postage stamp size is not worth it. Oh I could watch on my Teslstra phone in super shit mobile quality. But again I'll pass. Not the least because I don't have a Telstra acocunt. I wish Tropfest was more interested in sharing the videos of the people and less about extracting maximum dollars from them by bundling the content into DVD's. Showcasing the finalists would not have hurt the bottom line either.