Hi
I was interested to know if there is anyone out there, who are independent producers. like myself, who are offering their films online in a downloadable format via an ecomerce system.

The benefits of such a system would be that you can be your own distributor without having to distribute (ie only load movies online once, no need to duplicate into video/DVD......it is also environmentally friendly and incurs no shipping costs)

One disadvantage of just offering your movies as downloads could be 'gift purchases' such as at xmas.....people like having something to give someone....not just a blank cd with a downloaded movie.

But it is food for thought the whole movie e-download system, I'm sure as broadband becomes more prevalent, the entrepreneurs will be on to it and establishing brandnames...or maybe the Amazon's of today will just evolve.

I'm interested to hear others thoughts on this.....as a filmmaker it fascinates me as it could well provide another avenue by which to get your work out there, without having to kiss studio butt

A Google search for "download movies" results in many sites, but they are all cover-ups for illegal sharing of movies and music (peer to peer transfer).
That's not what you're after. But it seems to me that something like iTunes will appear for movies, just like it did for music.
Atomfilms is something like that for shorts (up to 30 minutes).
http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/home/

I believe divx has links to legitimate download sites.
http://www.divx.com