MIPCOM: The Week in Formats

TV Formats takes a look at the format highlights to come out of this year’s MIPCOM.

With drama still riding high on buyers’ wish lists across the international programming industry, scripted formats have been feeling the residual glow. The deals secured at MIPCOM last week provided further testament to this trend.

The U.S. broadcast net NBC acquired the rights for Un año para recordar, a scripted series that aired on Telefe in Argentina, with plans to adapt the show for the American market. GMA Worldwide licensed a pair of scripted formats—the hit Filipino dramas The Other Mrs. Real and My Destiny—to receive Mexican treatments. The Nippon TV drama Mother was sold into the Turkish market. Straddling the lines of scripted and non-, the fly-on-the-wall-style crime procedural Suspects clinched its first global commission, with FremantleMedia tying up with the German network RTL for a local version.

FremantleMedia was also promoting its first Chinese format at the marketFamiliar Taste, co-developed by Zhejiang Satellite and Purity Media. Co-development has become quite popular in the formats market these days, and MIPCOM saw some new alliances formed. For example, NBCUniversal International Formats and MBC Korea are planning to co-develop and produce original formats for Korean and international audiences. Armoza Formats followed up its recent co-development pacts with Canada’s QMI Content and China’s Sohu by entering into a new partnership with FILM.UA Group for virtual- and augmented-reality projects.

Armoza’s other agreements secured at the market demonstrate that there’s still plenty of appetite out there for entertainment formats, as it notched up sales for its game show Who’s Asking? across CEE countries, licensed the docureality series Marry Me Now for a British production and placed its new modeling competition Curvy Supermodel in Poland. Indeed, competition formats showed no signs of waning in popularity, despite moans of markets past that the genre has seen much saturation. Keshet International saw its singing-based reality format Rising Star get picked up by the Hindi general-entertainment channel Colors. Talpa’s megahit singing-based format The Voice continued to enter new markets, scoring a deal for a Singapore/Malaysia version. Talpa also used MIPCOM as an opportunity to launch its latest talent competition: The Next Boy/Girl Band, which was snapped up in Vietnam.

Outside of the talent-competition arena, Dori Media Group sold the reality format Power Couple to RTL Croatia, while WDR mediagroup’s speed-dating show Autumn Tingles is getting adapted in Finland. Social experiments, which were all the talk at MIPTV, saw some notable successes this market. Red Arrow International, which is already home to the hit social-experiment format Married at First Sight as well as Kiss Bang Love, secured two deals for its latest title in the genre, with Look Me in the Eye commissioned in France and Australia.

While there was no one particular groundbreaking new format that dominated MIPCOM with buzz, the sentiment surrounding innovation in the segment seemed generally upbeat. Zee Entertainment Enterprises unveiled its new “Format Factory,” an incubator meant to develop several new formats for the international marketplace. TV Formats will be keeping a close eye on all the latest format developments to see which hotbed might bring forth the next big global hit.

Catch up on these stories and more on TVFormats.ws.