VIDEO, TV & ANCILLARY MARKETS
Home video is obviously a very important market for the independent film maker. It's also the most difficult to hack.
The majors release hundreds of thousands of videocassettes of their movies. In fact, often they make more with video than with the theatrical and sometimes they lose money on theatrical releases, what with the millions spent on prints and advertising; but they still need a theatrical release to build up advertising for their home video releases.
If you try to sell to major video releasing companies, like Blockbuster (video,) you're at a disadvantage as an independent because your film may not have played theatrical or because you don't have any major stars in your movie. So, you're back to square one.
Still, you have to find a way to distribute your video, especially domestic home video, the most lucrative for the independent producer. You'll have to work with emerging video releasing companies. They need producers like you to make it to the market place. They are in a death-struggle with the majors, because the majors are profoundly hostile to new home video releasing companies (because of the volume these companies can generate.)
But here you have an opportunity since you can enter the home video market with a growing company and establish a working relationship for your future movies. It's also a source of financing for your subsequent movies. So work hard at establishing a friendly, mutually-beneficial relationship, a sort of negative pick-up deal for video.
One cautionary note, some video companies are branches of major studios, others are in the process of being gobbled up (as soon as they become viable and cannot be ignored by the majors.) If you sold to the "unknown" video company and that company is a branch of a major, you've been had, since you probably sold your video rights for peanuts. And if you sold all your rights, then let's hope you sold them for more than your budget costs, otherwise you took a beating. If you made money, however, and you were having trouble selling your movie anyway, don't worry about it.
Your easiest market for home video is the foreign market. If your film is represented by a distributor, the foreign video rights will be sold within the first two years. If you take the film to the markets yourself, you can succeed in selling the hottest markets all by yourself. In fact, it's a good learning experience. You need a lot of experience in the foreign market not to get ripped off and end up with your film in the bootleg market. If that happens you won't be able to sue everybody worldwide! That's the disadvantage of not having a reliable distributor to handle your foreign market video sales. And most films are bought with all rights, but rarely do foreign distributors do anything with the theatrical rights. They take them anyway because if they only buy home video rights, some bootlegger will buy the theatrical rights for the same territory and sell videocassettes anyway by copying the release print!)
TV markets are booming. In fact, as far as foreign sales are concerned, TV rights bring more money than home video now, because foreign TV stations are more powerful and generate a lot of advertising revenues, so they can afford to pay more for programming.
When you sell TV rights you have to negotiate a "window" clause, so that the TV rights buyer will not air your movie before the home video release has played itself out, usually about a six month period should be allowed.
Cable rights can be substantial with certain types of movies that for one reason or another the majors are not making. You can research this area and you'd be surprised how a well-chosen subject matter can do great as a cable release. I won't go into too much detail here, because this area of film making is a little too commercial for my taste. I prefer the more artistically-free approaches to film making (that's why I'm writing books now! Go ahead, laugh, laugh!)
If you like doing action films, you should think about shooting certain set-ups and stills with the idea of doing
DVD later on, or selling to DVD producers. There are even more markets for films, such as airline movies, military movies and educational markets -- all these go under the heading of ancillary markets.