With the trend in snowboard movies definitely shifting more and more from physical releases to online-only projects, we’d been wondering what the Big B’s take would be on it all for the coming season.

Turns out that much like Nike Snowboarding did in 2012 (and are doing again this year), Burton are focusing most of their filming output on a series of themed webisodes, with a total of four dropping throughout September and October and each focusing on a different ‘environment’: Backcountry (Friday 13/9), Street (Friday 27/9), Resort (Friday 11/10), and Women’s (Friday 25/10).

While it’s definitely a little odd branding women as an ‘environment’, we guess it’s also pretty rad that the team rippers of the fairer sex will be getting their own dedicated section.

Hats off to the dudes that planned out the intro to this trailer – it’s definitely not an original concept (heck, we’ve even seen very similar intros in a couple of the Mack Dawg movies from a few years back) but this one’s been beautifully filmed and executed.

The riding itself looks predictably incredible as well, with the usual heavy hitters (Jones, Sollors, Tonteri, Piiroinen, Müller, Deiss, Hale, Davis, Teter, Stock, Fasani, Clark, Rencz, Oksanen, Gold, Oestreng, Grilic, Rukajärvi, Sadar, Haakonsen, McMorris, Gerard, Haller, Ferguson, Ferguson, Crouch) all featuring in their respective ‘environments’. Sadly it looks like Mikkel Bang, who had one of the stronger parts in last year’s movie will be absent from this one.

There’s no question that all four of these webisodes will be bangers – and will be downloadable from the Burton site for free. But with the biggest single brand in snowboarding joining the ranks of brands doing away with (at least for this season) the concept of a single, unified team movie, you do wonder whether this is the beginning of the end of the feature-length format.

Here at Whitelines we think it’d be a crying shame if full-length team movies were to fizzle out entirely. We all have fond memories of ripping the cellophane off shred flicks received in the post or on the covers of magazines, slipping them into the DVD/VHS player and gawking over the whole thing start to finish with a beer in hand and buddies on either side to help with calling out the tricks.

Is the future of snowboard content already written in the stars? A world where snowboard footage is only ever watched within the online hemisphere and is broken down into bite-size fragments to suit internet browsing habits and drip-fed over an ‘X’ amount of time to prolong its relevance?

We hope not!