The motion picture industry is an exciting industry which generates not only well-known stars but also billions of dollars in revenue every year. A movie release typically goes through three stages: theater, home video, and TV. Its theatrical release is the most high-profile stage, and has attracted a lot of attention from the industry; as well as marketing academics. In contrast, very little research has been done on the home video business, when in fact home video is the true "cash cow" for the industry. As shown on many Hollywood studios' accounting books, for movies that go to both theaters and videos, home videos on average create higher revenue than domestic box office ticket sales. We investigate two issues related to the home video market in this dissertation: (1) how a movie distributor should strategically choose the optimal way to release its home videos and maximize total profit; and (2) since home video rental/retail sales are closely related to both movie performance and consumer word-of-mouth (WOM), what the relationship is between consumer self-reported/stated evaluation of a movie/video watching experience and the financial performance of the movie. There are two common strategies in the motion picture industry when releasing a home video: sequential release and simultaneous release. Simply put, sequential release is to release the video into the rental market through rental stores for an exclusive period of time before making it available for purchase. Alternatively, a simultaneous release strategy makes home video available to consumers for both rental and retail at the same time. To tackle issue 1, an analytical model is developed based on consumer and market behavior, and corresponding empirical analyses are provided to demonstrate supportive evidence. It appears that sequential release dominates simultaneous release as it offers greater margin for price discrimination. However, the model shows that the optimal choice of home video release depends on both consumer preference heterogeneity and movie characteristics. At the same time, rental demand over time and rental store inventory also influence the release strategy. Implications of the model provide general managerial guidance on what to look for and how to make good choices in releasing home videos. Several extensions of the basic model are provided. For issue 2, we take an further exploratory look at Internet movie ratings obtained from movie information website IMDB.com. The Internet provides consumers a platform to spread WOM. Consumer reviews and ratings of movies, books, and electronics etc. have become an important source of information for product choice. We select 266 movies theatrically released in 2002 and 2003 and exploratorily analyze the ratings they received at IMDB.com. By relating the number of ratings, average, variance, and shape (histogram) of these ratings to the raters' demographics and movie characteristics, we found significant difference in ratings across demographic groups and a close relationship between ratings and movie performance (i.e., box office sales). Discussion of the managerial implications of these findings is provided.