Making money with a web tv show?

[atb0802]

Me and my friends are thinking about starting our own production company and have some ideas to work on as a side project. We want to create a local entertainment site with web shows for our area. We want to get 4 different hosts, have 4 different shows and have 4 different blog type websites all connected to one main site. We will have a show/blog for local music, local sports, local filmmaking and local video games (we have a bunch of video game companies in the area).

We are hesitant about starting this because we don't know if or how much money we could make with a web tv site like this... Or how much time we should put into this to make some money. So our questions right now are:

1. How much money do you think we could make with this site if we have daily blogs and probably 5 videos each week for each of the 4 sections of our site.

2. How would we make money doing this? Just have advertisements on our site? Other ways or suggestions?

3. Are there any laws we need to know about before doing this since we hope to make money? (ex: have only unsigned bands? have certain people sign waivers to let us film sporting teams/concert venues/video games from different companies?)

this is just a far away idea right now, but is more of the reason we got into video production than just doing freelance video for other people. Let me know any feedback, suggestions or problems you see. Thanks for the help!

 

[Cassius]

1. None. At least not for a long time. After that, little.

2. Putting advertisements on your site can help cover the costs. If it's local you can get local businesses to pay for advertising once your reach is high enough, but it has to be pretty high.

3. Tons of them. Be aware of copyrights, release forms, defamation liability (since you're talking about locals), things like that. And if you're taking revenues from advertising you have to have a legal setup as to how that's allocated. Are you the only and you pay your friends, or is this a partnership? If it's a partnership you should have an agreement written detailing exactly how that works. You'll also probably be hiring web designers and things like that if you want to take it very far, but that's not really a legal issue as much as business planning.

I recommend figuring out every possible answer to every question and writing a proper business plan.