ABSTRACT
Cultural industry produces cultural products that are sold globally on a massive scale. There is a very unique– perhaps a more advanced form of– cultural industry that, however, does not produce and reproduce cultural products, but sells and transfers know-how and idea: it is the global trade and franchising of production and circulation of television formats. Television format business is the trading of a package of copyrighted calculated formula and well-planned concept for a television programme that is readily adapted to different cultures. In other words, quite different from our traditional understanding of cultural industries such as film, animation or music industries, the core business of which rests on its creativity, production and then its distribution, the television format trade is a secondary level of (re)production. It starts out with a source of knowledge and creative production of the original televised format, which is then ensued by a more complex and long process of cultural adaptation and localization of the knowledge in different locales under different contexts. As it has shown, while many adapted television formats largely follow the structure and flow of the original format design, there are some television formats that are vastly modified to cater for local taste, advertisers and political context.
