Television’s New Engine

Television is all shook up! In the post-broadcasting present of television, new structures, finances, technologies and players dominate the global mediaspace. One of the most important of these new engines is the new worldwide system for the distribution and production of programming based on the principle of the TV format. All television programs like all other human artefacts can be variously copied, imitated, cloned, adapted, counterfeited, parodied and so on quite irrespective of what one thinks of the results. The TV format principle, then, simply increases the adaptability of a program from place to place and from time to time.

It does this by systematically gathering together into a total package the set of knowledges, skills, information and other data which will make it easier to produce another version of the program. Hence, one homely way in which the international TV industry thinks about formats is as akin to cooking recipes out of which attractive and engaging concoctions can be prepared. A much more useful way of understanding the TV format is in terms of being a franchising service that producers prepare for licensees in other television territories. A franchise from MacDonald’s offers much more than tips on how to prepare hamburgers and fries. Hence, a TV program format franchise is a complex and comprehensive body of knowledge that not only offers a lot of advice on how to make a particular program but also carries significant information and advice in such areas as financing, programming, scheduling, promotion, marketing and so on.

However, the full significance of this extension to parts of the service industry of franchising cannot be confined to the phenomenon of worldwide circulation of such formatted programs as Big Brother, Pop Idol and Changing Rooms. Instead, the format principle has acted as Trojan Horse to two highly significant developments in the area of international programming distribution and production.