New Flows in Global TV provides a pioneering investigation into television distribution worldwide and the global trade in television program formats. Topics include explorations of how shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Big Brother are reformatted for audiences in diverse markets such as Argentina, South Africa, the Middle East, and China; the international circulation of Dallas in the 1980s; and Australian and United Kingdom programming exports in the last decade. Moran argues that distribution is the crucial link in a chain that dictates the consumption and purchase of television content. Consequently, New Flows in Global TV will be a key text for scholars of global media, providing comprehensive insight into the cultural, social and economic exchanges underlying media programming.

The past twenty years have seen major changes in the ways that television formats and programming are developed and replicated internationally for different markets—with locally focused repackagings of hit reality shows leading the way. But in a sense, that’s not new: TV formats have been being exported for decades, with the approach and methods changing along with changes in broadcast technology, markets, government involvement, and audience interest. This book brings together scholars of TV formats from around the world to analyze and discuss those changes and offer an up-to-the-minute analysis of the current state of TV formats and their use and adaptation worldwide.
 

Since the late 1990s, when broadcasters began adapting such television shows as Big Brother, Survivor, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? for markets around the world, the global television industry has been struggling to come to grips with the prevalence of program franchising across international borders. In TV Format Mogul, Albert Moran traces the history of this phenomenon through the lens of Australian producer Reg Grundy’s transnational career.

Program copycatting, Moran shows, began long before its most recent rise to prominence. Indeed, he reveals that the practice of cultural and commercial cloning from one place to another, and one time to another, has occurred since the early days of broadcasting. Beginning in the late 1950s, Grundy brought non-Australian shows to Australian audiences, becoming the first person to take local productions to an overseas market. By following Grundy’s career, Moran shows how adaptation and remaking became the billion-dollar business they are today. An exciting new contribution from Australia’s foremost scholar of television, TV Format Mogul will be a definitive history of program franchising.

 

Whether we stream them on our laptops, enjoy them in theaters, or slide them into DVD players to watch on our TVs, movies are part of what it means to be socially connected in the twenty-first century.  Despite its significant role in our lives, the act of watching films remains an area of social activity that is little studied, and thus, little understood. 

 

In Watching Films, an international cast of contributors correct this problem with a comprehensive investigation of movie going, cinema exhibition, and film reception around the world. With a focus on the social, economic, and cultural factors that influence how we watch and think about movies, this volume centers its investigations on four areas of inquiry: Who watches films? Under what circumstances? What consequences and affects follow? And what do these acts of consumption mean? Responding to these questions, the contributors provide both historical perspective and fresh insights about the ways in which new viewing arrangements and technologies influence how films get watched everywhere from Canada to China to Ireland.

 

A long-overdue consideration of an important topic, Watching Films provides an engrossing overview of how we do just that in our homes and across the globe.