DIGITAL L.A. A PLETHORA OF ENTERTAINING WEBCASTS.

Byline: David Bloom 

Music, comedy and animation have filled the Net with several notable Webcasts in recent days that are definitely worth checking out.

Start with the music site Riffage.com (www.riffage.com), which is showing 50 hours of this year's New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Among the acts are Big Easy stalwarts the Neville Brothers, the Radiators and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and national acts such as Big Bad Voodoo Daddies, Ani DiFranco, the Allman Brothers and Better Than Ezra. The Webcasts end Friday.

E! Online (www.eonline.com) is running a weekly Interactive Comedy Course featuring chats between the American Film Institute's Jim Hosney and prominent directors among much else.

``Pretty Woman'' director Garry Marshall will participate Wednesday, followed by ``Airplane!'' co-directors David Zucker and Jim Abrahams, ``Tootsie'' director Sydney Pollack and ``Big Daddy'' director Dennis Dugan.

And finally, fans of the epic Final Fantasy videogames can download a 53-second, 8-megabyte trailer of the first movie based on the series. Go to www.finalfantasy.com to see the sleek site.

The futuristic animated film - featuring Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Peri Gilpin, Ming-Na, Ving Rhames, Donald Sutherland and James Woods - is set for release next year.

Final Fantasy creator Square Inc. is known for wonderful animated cut scenes and cinematic storytelling in its games. I, and I suspect many other Final Fantasy players, can't wait to see how subsidiary Square Pictures applies those talents to the big screen. The trailer provides promising evidence.

< Gaming giants

Little noticed in the big Vivendi-Universal Studios purchase was what it may mean for the fast-growing, fast-changing videogame business.

Universal is home to some of the PlayStation's biggest franchises, creating both the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon series.

And Vivendi already owned Havas Interactive, whose Torrance headquarters oversees divisions such as Blizzard Entertainment - the maker of million-selling PC games such as Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft - and Sierra Online, maker of PC hit Half-Life (coming soon to the Dreamcast, by the way).

To welcome in the deal, in fact, Blizzard announced that Diablo II sold 1 million units in its first two weeks. To put it mildly, there had been a bit of pent-up demand.

And add in rumors that Havas may next buy Eidos, who made a mint off Tomb Raider but is struggling financially despite some good recent titles, and you have the possibility of a gaming powerhouse of truly grandiose proportions, especially when you throw in access to many of the entertainment franchises generated by Universal's TV, animation and movie operations.

< Small pictures, big bucks

Who says there's no money in small films? iCAST (www.icast.com) doled out $100,000 to five directors for their short films in a just-concluded contest judged by a panel of show-biz veterans.

The winner, getting $40,000 for his piece about a spurned lover finding romance at the end of his rope, was Alex Weed. Four other filmmakers - John Hargrave, Tom Birmingham, David Cassidy and Kenny Meehan - each received $15,000. That'll buy a lot of digital videotape.

Director Michael Lehman, one of the judges, said the excellent submissions overall showed that ``even with limited budgets, independent filmmakers using the digital format can create really good content for the Web. As the technology gets better, making films will become as easy as writing poetry.''

SITE OF THE WEEK

--KIISFMi.com: The digital equivalent of Los Angeles broadcast station KIIS-FM, it is garnering insider raves, with a Webby Award nomination this spring and trade publication Radio Ink putting the site at the top of its list of the best Web radio stations.

--Where: www.kiisfmi.com

--What's cool: Four mixes of music - ``mainstream,'' hip hop, house and retro - give you access to a more targeted mix of tunes than the broadcast side can.

--Features: A ton of features that show what's possible for for a site from a commercial broadcast station: a discussion area (though really insipid); contests, quizzes, news, shopping, horoscopes, jokes, a shopping and clothes area presided over by hottie DJ Ellen K, info on the ``iJs'' and of course, the ability to request a song by e-mail. They also have started a Webcasting operation, FMiTV, that will carry video from events like the recent Wango Tango concert.

--You'll like this if: You want to tune in to what's happening with commercial broadcast radio on the Net.

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