Ifilm Company

ON a recent Tuesday morning, Doug Hammond told his colleagues that he had a winner: "We've got a strange video of Sharon Stone unleashing a very bizarre ... scolding of a German audience during this auction she did," he said, sitting in an easy chair, his legs tucked under him. "She's going, 'Naughty Germans. Naughty, nasty Germans.' " The rest of the room chuckled -- always a good sign.

MTV Networks, the cable television channels owned by Viacom Inc., bought Internet video provider Ifilm Corp. for $49 million to add short movies from Hollywood studios and amateur filmmakers to its websites. Ifilm, based in Hollywood, has the biggest library of short films on the Web and reaches more than 10 million users a month, MTV said in an e-mailed statement Thursday.