Inside Move: Netcos find religion, baptize old media ties

Live Planet, AtomFilms among those to make pacts

By DAVID BLOOM

A coincidental set of announcements over the past several days summed up the shrinking opportunities online in Hollywood. Where these companies once sought Net riches, now they're finding refuge in more traditional, and potentially lucrative, media locales.

• Live Planet -- the glamour startup headed by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and producers Chris Moore and Sean Bailey -- signed a two-year feature production deal with Disney.

  In doing so, the company ditched its ambitions to create complex integrated projects. As Moore said, such combo movie-TV-Net projects "are hard to do and can take a very long time."

  They don't make as much as a $100 million tentpole either.

• AtomFilms will create a cable channel around its library of shorts. A merger with Shockwave.com did little to revive prospects online, but deals with Comcast and Global Media Holdings could generate, shockingly, actual cash flow.

• Hypnotic, once an online film site, now pointedly bills itself as a "branded-entertainment and short-film production company."

  The Viv U unit helped produce "The Bourne Identity," whose helmer, Doug Liman, is mentoring five filmmakers in Hypnotic's latest win-a-film-deal contest, the renamed (and now classically branded) Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival.

• And finally, some of the last shards of online services company Movie Magic Technologies, formerly Creative Planet, were sold last week to brick-and-mortar services company Entertainment Partners.

Proceeds from the Movie Magic software line will finance work on other software of MMT, which will now be renamed Studio Systems.