The founders of the Tribeca Film Festival say the future of cinema is not just in the multiplex, but also on the monitor of your computer. Now they’re looking to a younger generation of technology-savvy cineastes to help them push the festival into these new digital frontiers.

For the first time, Tribeca’s founders and board members are tapping an unlikely group of advisers — college students — for advice on marketing and distributing films through digital technology. Students from New York University Stern School of Business’ Undergraduate College will propose ideas to festival executives on how to use so-called “new media platforms” to reach the widest possible audience online.

This opportunity comes at a critical time for Tribeca, the festival’s chief operating officer, Jon Patricof, said. Internet distribution “is causing a real sea change in the way we think about content delivery” by “giving films a way of getting noticed outside the traditional distribution system.”

On-demand services like GreenCine and IPTV, for instance, are allowing users to watch streaming movies on an entirely different platform: the home computer. Similarly, movie download portals, such as Jaman and EZTakes, are letting users watch anything from a full-length feature on their laptop to a short film or trailer on their iPod or cell phone screen.

Tribeca’s founders say they are now intent on learning as much as possible about these technologies from those who know them best: young people.

“These students have grown up in an age of digitization,” the NYU professor overseeing the partnership work with Tribeca, Al Lieberman, said. “They already have a working knowledge of the technologies that Tribeca is just starting to grapple with and can discuss them in a way nobody else can.”

Indeed, online video viewing is a province of the young, experts say. According to a recent survey sponsored by the Pew Research Center, nearly a third of Internet users age 18 to 29 regularly download movies — five times that of users age 50 and over.

Young people are “clearly shaping the way film content is being marketed and distributed,” the festival’s co-founder, Craig Hatkoff, said.

Yet, young people’s viewing habits are becoming more difficult to track, due to the wider array of platforms they are using, he said. For Tribeca producers, this is causing added uncertainty about how to adapt the festival’s wide range of content, including both a 15-minute animation short and a 216-minute feature film, to so many different platforms.

“How many people are going to watch this trailer on an iPod? How many are going to download that movie on their laptop?” Mr. Hatkoff said. “It’s like the printing press has just been invented, and we’re trying to figure out whether we should be handing out pamphlets or Encyclopedias Britannicas.”

The students’ work at Tribeca marks the culmination of the new undergraduate course created by Mr. Lieberman, where students write research papers and create PowerPoint presentations that they eventually submit to the festival’s key decision makers.

One student, Samuel Baumel, is working on a social-networking platform that would be added to Tribeca’s existing Web site, where users would be able to view filmmaker profiles, post reviews, and even make recommendation to other festival-goers. Such a feature, he said, would not only draw heavier Web traffic to the site, but also provide marketers with a valuable window into the specific tastes and preferences of these users.

A social-networking function “would allow Tribeca to really target its marketing efforts at the niches that drive tastes,” Mr. Baumel said.

Another student, Andrew Corkin, is proposing an exclusive Web-video portal that would allow users to download Tribeca’s films after they’ve been screened to the public.

With major studios inking fewer distribution deals on the festival circuit each year (only about a dozen of Tribeca’s 120 features this year are likely to be picked up, according to Mr. Hatkoff), a second-run Web portal would give Tribeca’s films a conduit for additional exposure after the festival ends, Mr. Corkin said.

“The Web is a way for your films to be seen … to keep your project from sitting on the shelf,” Mr. Corkin, an aspiring filmmaker who has distributed a number of his own projects on the Internet, said.