The Format Business

International Journal of Digital Television, 2018

Critical Studies in Television, 2013

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

By allowing a separation between content development and final production, global formats help traditionally isolated industries to break through the linguistic and geo-cultural barriers that hindered their participation in the finished global trade. Moreover, formats are at the heart of the process through which television, as a global medium, is responding to its changing environment. As the medium is faced with growing pressures to adjust to the presence of new media convergence, TV industries around the world are interacting in their efforts to rework the medium’s popular forms. The rise of formatting exchange practices thus mark a radical decentring of the process through which the medium generates and regenerates its ‘formula art’ (Fiske 1987). To illustrate the complexity of flows involved here one would be hard pressed to find a better example than the recent emergence of the Israeli format industry into as unlikely ‘global Cinderella’. Understanding why and how Israeli companies achieved their global success stands to teach us something about the reconfiguration of the centre-periphery relationship in contemporary ‘planet TV’. While the most prevalent discussion of formats is heavily focused on the question of travel, knowledge transfer or franchising (formats are shows that get packaged in one territory and reproduced in another), this chapter poses that to understand their radical potential we must explore the practice of formatting as a fundamental process for television content development even before transnational transfer takes place. Therefore, before the chapter turns to discuss the implications of the Israeli case study, it first explores the significance of formatting for television, starting with the fundamental question: what are formats before they get packaged for transnational reproduction? Using a television studies analysis of medium, culture and industry, the chapter offers a wider historical and theoretical context for the practice of formatting to help explain how the transnational “stretching” of the process helped intervene in the established hierarchies of core-periphery that have underpinned the cultural dominance of the US in the global television industry.

Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 2010

The last decade has witnessed the growth of TV formats such as Big Brother or The X Factor, developed in one market and sold internationally for local adaptation. This article reveals the scale and significance formatted television content has attained, drawing on a case study analysis of US schedules from the 2007–2008 broadcast season. The high share of formatted programming found in primetime schedules (an average of 33% of broadcast hours) becomes understandable in light of the context and the advantages formats have for broadcasters and producers. The findings suggest that the franchising of content, both expression and outcome of television's commercial saturation, will continue to play a crucial role in TV schedules around the world. This franchising will contribute to the convergence of television globally, not just structurally but also in terms of concrete, albeit locally modified, content.

The television industry provides us with a priviledged perspective from which we can verify the theory of historical ebbs and flows, by virtue of the cyclical tendencies which characterise many phenomena related to programming and consumption of the one or the other content typology. 2000, a higly symbolic year because it marked a transition from the old to the new millenium, is legitimately part of this cyclical, or pendular, state of affairs. It was actually a year in which the pendulum swung sharply in the direction of entertainment programmes, reality and game shows, as had already happened in the past, and in particular at the beginning of the nineties. Instead of (or prior to) programmes, in truth, we should be speaking of formats. There is no doubt that during 2000 the phenomenon which struck the television industry most impressively was what has come to be known as " format fever ". It was powerfully supported by the triumphal march of Big Brother across Europe and the prodigious upsurge of vanishing ratings experienced after many years by the American networks, thanks to Who wants to be a millionaire? (ABC) and Survivor (CBS): forerunners of a longer European format caravan that still winds its way across the ocean, creating (but not for the first time) a two-way circulation of international television flows. It is probable, and even fairly predictable, given that the television industry proceeds by ebbs and flows, that the overwhelming surge of new entertainment formulae is destined to fall off in a more or less near future; the second editions of the same programmes are proving to be less exciting than the first. However, it is just as likely that the after-effects and drift might continue over time, since television is facing uncertain economic prospects, and the great competitive advantage of reality and game shows resides in their much more contained production costs when compared to scripted shows like fiction.

International Journal of Cultural Studies

VIEW: Journal of European Television History & Culture, 2016

2004

Abstract Globalization has intensified interconnectivity among television industries worldwide. Interconnectivity happens through structural and institutional linkages among television systems and industries worldwide, resulting in an increasingly integrated global business governed by similar practices and goals. The dynamics are reflected in the popularity of television formats.