It's not at all unusual for movie studios to build buzz for forthcoming films by holding movie screenings. What is unusual—but may in the future become commonplace—is to conduct some of those screenings virtually.
One company that's already dabbling in this area is Japan's Shochiku Studio. Wanting to generate excitement for the Hollywood action thriller Next (starring Nicholas Cage) which it is distributing, Shochiku has announced that it will premiere the film to a select audience to be chosen by lottery—and that the film will be shown to them by transmission to their cell phones!
It turns out that the gimmick serves a couple of purposes. First, the studio hopes that the cutting-edge promotion will generate plenty of anticipatory chat on social networking sites and blogs, and second, that it will draw attention to additional cell phone video content that's available through Dogado, a Shochiku subsidiary that specializes in producing full-length, made-for-cellphone movies and other content (ex. see Clearness).
Given the recent proliferation of 1-seg equipped cell phones with high resolution displays, and the introduction of fixed price, unlimited bandwidth usage packages by cell carriers, a number of companies have been working on new video-for-cell phone offerings. We're only going to see more experimentation of this type going forward, and it's fine by me since I'm about to pick up one of the latest portable handsets myself.
By the way, the keitai premiere of Next will be held on April 21. The movie opens in Japanese theaters at the end of the month.