SecondLifeCasinos.com entrepreneur SL Loonie is launching a new way to screen your real life and SL movies into Second Life - by paying for them. In a world of cheap server space and free hosting options for Quicktime movies, such as blip.tv, I have to wonder how she plans to profit from this venture. Her prices range from 5 dollars all the way up to 80 dollars USD for 30 days of viewing. In addition, she has hosting and sponsorship options for parties. Maybe she didn't get the memo that residents have been doing this for free since the movie stream was introduced?

On the plus side, she's also hosting a contest where you can win L prizes and free screenings of your film. They are looking for the Tube2SL YouTube Film Producer of the Year 2007. What does this mean? They will take your work, which has already been compressed down to a low quality flash file and download it, then re-encode it to Quicktime format. I see Oscar potential. Or do I? The quality is pretty bad so I can't actually tell.

I'm all for showing off your hard work in Second Life, but I simply cannot endorse a pay model when there are so many other choices out there. If you're genuinely interested in earning the 25,000L price and seeing your movie highly pixelated on the big screen, you can get the rules and info here. The contest ends on September 14th, with the winners being announced on the 29th and 30th. Will you be participating?