The Internet offers new hope for European cinema, still dominated by Hollywood, to boost its international distribution, European culture ministers and film industry executives said here Tuesday.

The chance for filmmakers to target new audiences and niche markets is huge on the web, they said at the Cannes film festival.

"The advent of film online offers immense opportunities for the film industry both with regard to access to new audiences and with regard to wider circulation of European films, including on international markets," they said in a statement.

"Audiences are often currently deprived of access to certain films -- either for geographical reasons or because more artistic or experimental films have difficulty in being screened widely."

The statement predicted a win-win situation for Internet access providers as well based on greater demand for broadband services capable of carrying films with high-quality, high-speed transmission.

But piracy poses a growing hazard and a European Leadership Summit on online film has been formed to examine the problem, said the ministers and film executives after meeting here Tuesday.

"There are indeed risks of a disastrous loss in revenue if the market is inundated with unauthorized file sharing of films, as has been seen with music," they said, adding that the campaign against illegal file sharing would include a public education drive.

Despite the new opportunities offered by the Internet, there is no expectation that the curtain will fall on the traditional popcorn-and-silver-screen experience of the movie theater, their statement said.

"The collective experience of seeing a film in a cinema will remain a privileged medium," they wrote, noting that television, videos and DVDs had only stoked audiences' interest in films.

European filmmakers have long complained they are squeezed out of cinemas at home and poorly promoted abroad in the face of the Hollywood marketing juggernaut.

In France, for example, the film industry is especially vibrant because of state subsidies, but even there, 40 percent of box office tickets sold are for homegrown films with most of the rest going to US mainstream productions.

Tuesday's meeting brought together the European Union's commissioner for media, Viviane Reding, with film industry leaders and EU cultural affairs ministers.