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. In the last ten years the trade in television, or TV, formats has become extremely

active, partly because of the proven popularity of the formats, and partly because television stations across the world are in extreme need of quickly produced television content that fills up the air time, in particular in Asia where the number of channels has increased exorbitantly as the economy has risen. With the everincreasing popularity of TV formats that travel globally, there is a concomitantly growing number of publications on TV formats. Among them, most studies have conceived and classified TV formats as an emerging and popular genre of television that creates local and global impact by various means of local adaptation, and hence it becomes a cultural form of globalization. While such descriptions are in general correct, globalization of TV formats is relatively a new phenomenon in the history of television, and therefore a more accurate trajectory of approach and framework of studying TV format is still under exploration.