The new millennium has seen the franchising of television content escalate. The trade in so-called TV formats, like Big Brother or The X Factor, sold internationally for local adaptation, has multiplied. This article aims to illuminate the development of the format trade and the reasons
for its acceleration and globalization in the early twenty-first century. It will be argued that franchising has come to play and will continue to play a prominent role in the TV content business: First, because of digital television’s highly competitive, commercial multi-platform ecosystem.
Second, because ongoing internationalization and gradual convergence of TV systems globally diminish national barriers of structure and agency; and third, because of the popularity of light entertainment, coupled with formats’ multiple advantages as compared to locally developed programming,
specifically TV fiction.
This article is concerned with the consolidation of European TV format production companies during the first two decades of the twenty-first century and its likely impact on the configuration and long-term sustainability of the world’s leading format production market, the United Kingdom. Theoretically and methodologically influenced by various approaches – critical political economy, meso-level television industries research and scholarship concerned with the locational choice of economic activity – this exploratory study combines the macro-picture of consolidation at the European and international level with a fine-grained case study of the UK television market. It discloses an ecology faced with a range of opportunities and threats, likely to result in marked and enduring changes to UK entertainment.
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