The affiliate model that built e-commerce into a trillion-dollar powerhouse has never touched film. That’s about to change.

TL;DR: 

• Affiliate marketing built e-commerce into a trillion pound industry. Now it is coming to film.

• Hiway, co-founded by veteran sales agent Zach Rothwell, lets producers give fans, influencers and even cast members a cut of revenue for pushing their film, paid out in real time, no CDN costs, no lost data. Raindance is already running it.

• Producers who capture their own audience walk into a negotiation with leverage that a sales agent actually respects: a hundred thousand email addresses beats half a million disappearing YouTube likes.

• The catch: syndication only works once you’ve got an audience to syndicate, and it won’t finance your next film. But it does hand curator-minded producers, the ScotFlix and Raindance Releasing types, a new income stream and a public way to prove their taste before their own slate is ready.

• Building an audience isn’t optional anymore. It’s the wake-up call the Obsession and Backrooms crowd already had.

Last Friday, I hosted a Creative HQ clinic with Zach Rothwell, co-founder of Hiway and head of international sales and distribution at High Fliers Films. Zach came on to talk with Creative HQ producers about a tool that he hopes will bring the same income explosion to cinema that affiliate marketing brought to online retail a decade ago. Our question going in was simple: is this another TVOD gimmick? Or a genuine step forward for producers navigating fragmented audiences?

The trillion-dollar marketing tool that cinema almost forgot

The Affiliate and Partner Marketing Association’s State of the Affiliate Nation 2025 report puts a figure on what most of us only vaguely register scrolling past a TikTok product link: UK brands invested £1.7 billion in affiliate and partner marketing in 2024, generating 360 million sales and £2.2 million in revenue every hour. Brands are seeing an average return of £16 for every £1 spent. Nearly 70,000 active affiliates are promoting close to 7,400 brands.

Love it or hate it, affiliate marketing reshaped how products get sold, built entirely on the idea that anyone with an audience, however small, could earn a cut for making an introduction. As Zach put it on the call: “we all know that affiliate marketing turned e-commerce into a trillion dollar industry... no one has ever done that for content before. Until now.”

What Hiway actually does

Hiway isn’t a streaming platform. It’s not trying to be the next Netflix or iTunes, and Zach was clear on that point more than once. It’s infrastructure: a backend that sits behind whatever forward-facing distribution you’re already doing, giving filmmakers a way to store, share, monetise and livestream content while keeping ownership of the IP, the pricing, the geo-blocking and, critically, the data.

That data point is the one to focus on. Thirty-eight years into running a distribution company, Zach told the group, High Fliers had never held a single piece of customer data. Every platform deal handed the audience relationship to someone else. Hiway was built to reverse that.

The tool getting the most attention on the call, and the one doing the affiliate marketing work, is what Hiway calls ‘content syndication’. When you upload a film to Hiway, it sits in your own account as a single source of truth for your content, that can be streamed to any device anywhere in the world. From there, you can grant a third party (a fan, an influencer, a festival, a cast member, anyone) a digital contract to stream and promote your film, at whatever revenue split you choose. That third party gets a unique SmartLink. Viewers experience streaming from the promoter’s site or social page. In fact, the stream is running from the filmmaker’s account the entire time, which means the promoter carries zero streaming or CDN costs, and the filmmaker can see exactly who is watching, where, and when, with payment settled in real time.

Fewer uploads. Greater transparency. Happy days.

Raindance is already running this at scale through Raindance Releasing, where audiences experience streaming from the festival’s platform but the content and the majority of the revenue sit with the producer. The mechanism is the same one that turned an influencer’s TikTok into a functioning sales channel for a skincare brand, applied to a film.

Why this matters and why producers should pay attention

One of the most important moments on the call was a story Zach told about a filmmaker he met at a festival who had a trailer sitting at half a million likes on YouTube, and hadn’t sold the film. There was no way to reach any of those half a million people again. Compare that to a producer walking into the same room with 100,000 email addresses captured through owned links. “I think that changes the conversation altogether,” Zach said, “because that’s the data there, and you can target them.”

That’s the shift affiliate marketing already forced in retail: attention matters less than connection. Connection with the audience, not the size of it, is what moves the needle. Zach described the current sales and distribution market in blunt terms: content that might have sold for £100,000 two years ago is closer to £30,000 now. In a market this compressed, a validated, owned, contactable audience is essential. It gives producers leverage, which they rarely have otherwise.

To be clear, Hiway isn’t positioning this as a replacement for sales agents or distributors, and Zach was direct about that too. Companies the size of Amazon or Samsung, aren’t going to rebuild their infrastructure overnight, however much money the technology could save them on delivery costs. Traditional distribution still closes the deals that need a broadcaster’s or a platform’s infrastructure. What changes is the timeline. Instead of waiting to build an audience once a sales agent has secured a deal, producers can start capturing and monetising an audience from the ideation stage, using syndication and pre-sales to generate revenue and proof of demand long before a traditional deal is even on the table.

What if you don’t have an audience yet?

None of this solves the problem most producers actually have, which is that syndication only works once an audience exists to syndicate to. Hiway monetises an audience. It doesn’t build it, and building it is the slower, harder, chronically underfunded part of the job that no platform has yet cracked. There’s also the financing question Creative QH producer Sias raised on the call: the traditional system, punishing as it is, gives producers something a wallet full of email addresses doesn’t, which is leverage against future revenue that a senior lender or an equity partner will actually recognise. A hundred thousand sign-ups is, for most, still not collateral against a $5 million budget. Hiway offers a new way of doing things to an industry that consistently bets on the devil they know. It is a very useful instrument in a much longer, messier transition towards audience-backed cinema. But for the producers looking at the success of Obsession and Backrooms and thinking ‘why didn’t I build a YouTube audience 10 years ago?!’, this may be the financially incentified wake-up call they need to take audience-building seriously.

The part that should interest producers most

There’s a second opportunity buried in this that has nothing to do with your own film. Content syndication doesn’t require you to be the filmmaker. Creative HQ producer Maureen Hascoet’s ScotFlix and Raindance Releasing are both, in effect, acting as syndicators for other people’s work, taking a cut for aggregating and promoting a slate they didn’t produce. That’s not a new business model but it is smart. It’s how a lot of today’s big players in film got started: acquiring small films, taking them to market, and using that revenue to eventually finance production of their own. Did someone sayA24 (again)?

Zach drew a comparison to gaming that’s worth repeating to anyone still financing films the traditional way. Game studios routinely build communities, on Discord, on Reddit, before there’s a product to sell. By the time they announce anything, they already have market validation. The games industry is now roughly triple the size of the film industry. Film still tends to work in reverse: build it and they will come. Except, too frequently, they don’t.

You’re a culture-maker now

In 2026, a producer’s reputation is increasingly built on the films they choose to stand behind, not just the ones they make. I made this comparison on the call to the ‘top ten’ and ‘top hundred’ lists that fuel publications like Sight & Sound and The Guardian with sustained traffic. These lists have become genuinely important pieces of IP because they signal the most valuable asset in modern film sales: good taste. A producer who becomes a paid affiliate for a curated slate is making a public, repeated statement about who they are as a curator and a cultural voice. That’s evidence of judgement, built in public, well before your own film exists to prove it. And underneath the brand-building, the practical groundwork is still compounding: audience capture, pricing and promotion, tested and refined on other people’s projects, so that by the time your own release lands, you’re running a marketing process you’ve already stress-tested rather than inventing one under deadline.

Affiliate marketing didn’t replace retail. It sat alongside it and became one of the most efficient channels in the industry, worth £1.7 billion a year in the UK alone. Film and TV have spent a decade watching that model work everywhere except their own industry. Hiway is the first serious attempt to bring it in-house. Whether it becomes the standard or simply forces the standard to change, producers who understand how it works now will be negotiating from a very different position to the ones who don’t.