ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a key aspect of television’s transformation during the first two decades of the twenty-first century: the radical growth of the trade in TV formats and its subsequent impact on TV production and distribution globally. TV formats are internationally franchised and localized programs, like for instance Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (1998–) or Got Talent (2006–). During the 2000s, the trade in TV formats became a systematized business and for TV channels around the world, a major form of sourcing content. Gradually, all entertainment genres came to be formatted, including game and talent shows, reality and lifestyle programs, comedy and drama series. This chapter illuminates how and why the format business was established in the early 2000s and proliferated during the next 15 years. It reveals how formats are adapted in practice and how they have been theorized. Finally, it argues and demonstrates how the format trade has contributed to changing the television sector in three major ways: (1) establishing transnational production and distribution structures; (2) producing a transnational tribe of TV executives, who diffuse know-how globally on a scale not seen before, and thereby transnationalizing production and distribution practices; and (3) growing the trade in TV programs in scope and scale, geographically expanding, multiplying, and diversifying program flows, and complexifying international TV content licensing.
