Despite Bell Globemedia's proposed buyout of CHUM, it's business as usual for the latter's new broadband service MuchAXS.

So says David Kines, VP music and youth services for CHUM Television, who insists it's too early to speculate how the merger with BGM, parent of CTV and MTV Canada, will affect the online spin-off of MuchMusic.

MuchAXS launched on June 28, just two weeks ahead of the buyout announcement, and follows the March debut of MTV Overdrive.

The rival broadband services and siblings-to-be already have something of a family resemblance. MuchAXS (muchmusic.com/axs) also features full-screen video clips, and in some cases, entire shows, of in-house titles including Much News and The New Music, plus music videos, interviews and concert footage.

Kines takes pains to describe the service as an evolution of the existing MuchMusic brand and website, and not as a response to Overdrive. CHUM says AXS has been in development since last summer.

"We're redesigning the [MuchMusic.com] website all the time and adding new features," such as MuchAXS, says Kines.

He points to the vast CHUM/Much archive, dating back to the 1960s, as a key difference. "We've got a ton of Canadian content and artists in our archives, and it's coming from a 25-year or more history of covering all music, not just accessing an international U.S. library," he says. New material is being added daily.

CTV's VP of digital media Kris Faibish welcomes the Much launch. "Bring it on," she says. "It validates what we're already doing, and they're acknowledging that there is a market for it."

However, she also insists the two services are "compatible," with AXS being the "Canadian brand" and Overdrive relying on what she says is a much larger library of music videos in addition to its full-length shows. Faibish declined to speculate on which service's technology might come out on top should there be any consolidation if the buyout is approved by the CRTC and the Competition Bureau.

"These are very complementary services, and they're both independent businesses and will continue to be independent."

FilmCAN into distributing

Nonprofit online magazine FilmCAN says its new feature film distribution service is now open for business.

FilmCAN Distribution has partnered with online indie music distributor Zunior.com to make indie Canadian films available for download. In the manner of most indie ventures, it's starting small and humble, currently offering just four films for download at www.filmcan.org, including Ron Mann's Grass and Clive Holden's Trains of Winnipeg.

FilmCAN publisher Ryan Noth says the library will focus on thematic programming - for example, "English-language realist cinema of the '70s."

"Our goal is to double our films each [quarterly] issue," he says. "We're not going to take just any film. Our mandate is to do a boutique programming kind of thing."