a film is released simultaneously in theaters as well as DVD and/or cable, may offer a way for the true low-budget B movie to regain some of the audience it has lost. In a similar fashion, the popularity of Internet sites such as YouTube have opened up entirely new avenues for the presentation of motion pictures made on a shoestring. Abel Ferrara, envisioning his first digital film, says, "I want to do it on the Internet...and put it out in 10-minute increments. I know that watching films on computer is the future—it's a direct connection to the audience." Many of these developments have come together to create a boom in a relatively new form of low-budget genre picture. The fan film, typically an unauthorized production set in the imaginary universe of a popular genre movie or TV series, may be thought of as the most widespread present incarnation of the B movie. "Arguably the first fan film was Hardware Wars, a short spoof from 1977 depicting toasters and egg-beaters fighting in space," according to journalist Curt Holman. "In the first decade of the new millenni[um], fan films have grown exponentially in quantity and improved significantly in quality and ambition...[t]hanks to digital cameras, affordable editing software and online distribution." In 2002, Lucasfilm created a yearly award ceremony for noncommercial fan films, arranging to screen them online via AtomFilms (purchased in 2006 by MTV Networks). Star Wars: Revelations (2005), a 40-minute drama directed by Shane Felux for a production cost of $20,000, has apparently been downloaded by millions. Similar projects are designed as "episodes" set in the TV-based Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer universes. A parallel development in fan culture has been inspired in part by the direct-to-video market, whose products garner little notice and less respect in mainstream culture. According to scholar Linda Ruth Williams, the "new B-movie culture runs on the convoluted equation that cheap means bad which means good. Such products garner far more respect from fans because they manage to press the same buttons on one million dollars (or less) rather than one hundred million (or more)." Since 2006, The Asylum—a production company founded in 1997—has specialized in low-budget pictures also inspired by the big-budget films that have largely usurped the B movie's place in the theatrical market. The company makes what one critic dubbed "mockbusters", straight-to-video knockoffs of major studio action pictures: Transformers, for instance,