The way we watch movies is changing. And no one knows how, in the not so distant future, cinema’s going to be consumed — especially those independent and art films that are increasingly unloved by the Hollywood distribution system. Multiplexes may not be the place for defiantly indie cinema, but are iPods, Xboxes, laptops and flat-screens their next best hope?

There are entrepreneurs who are betting on it, which has led to the recent spread of web sites dedicated to putting harder to find films online, from the documentary-centric SnagFilms to the highfalutin internet cinematheque The Auteurs. If there’s one thing that these sites share in today’s tough economic climate, it’s a boldness to try something new when most businesses are scaling back — that, and the fact that they all have founders who are filthy rich.

But are a handful of deep-pocketed backers enough to make independent films thrive online? At this point, it’s hard to say. But by all accounts, at least one heavily capitalized site, Jaman.com — founded in 2006 as a viewing portal for independent and world cinema, with a significant emphasis on Bollywood movies — is losing steam and may not survive in its current form.

The central problem for lovers of indie film and the people who make it their business to show those films, whether in theaters or in the newfangled Web, is that the population that drives the business is ultimately a small one. Why is Hulu the most popular kid in school, and Jaman that nice, hard-working student that nobody remembers? Because Hulu has “Saturday Night Live,” “National Lampoon’s Spring Break” and “Family Guy,” while Jaman has “Chokher Bali,” “A Monk’s Awakening” and a low-budget T&A pic called “Pool Party” among its most popular titles. Netflix is one of the rare companies that has helped to cultivate a taste for indie films, but its primary business is still the delivery of old-fashioned DVDs.

Indie-focused sites have a much harder time of making a dent in a slowly developing marketplace. As Efe Cakarel admits, “The truth is that there are not enough people paying to watch films online at the moment.” But he has hope. “We believe that by focusing on quality films that are hard to find on other online platforms we can build our brand, and when the online VOD market takes off, we will be a leading platform for foreign, independent and classic films.”

The problem is waiting for that day to come. Though The Auteurs has made some high-profile partnerships recently — art-cinema juggernaut The Criterion Collection took an equity stake in the outfit and Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation is lending them select films — current traffic to the site is paltry. It’s still in its nascent stages, but the top-viewed films (South Korean director Kim Ki-young’s 1960 melodrama “The Housemaid,” Turkish auteur Metin Erksan’s 1964 film “Dry Summer” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist classic “L’avventura”), all available for free, have been watched, collectively, fewer times than this YouTube video of a golden retriever jumping up to bite a dangling udon noodle. “The numbers,” says Cakarel, “are not an indication of the scale nor the opportunity of what we are trying to achieve.”