Avi Armoza’s Outlook on the Format Business

The industry has had its ups and downs over the last couple of years as Covid-19 affected every aspect of life, but Avi Armoza, founder and CEO of Armoza Formats, part of ITV Studios, is starting to see business pick back up again. Fortunately for the format business, sales generally remained stable throughout the pandemic, according to Armoza, something that other sectors of the media industry may not be lucky enough to say. “The big change,” he notes, “was the ability to bring and sell very new ideas.” Broadcasters and platforms wanted to “go safe on existing titles” and had “less appetite to launch and bring new shows.”

Part of this, Armoza believes, is due to the lack of in-person markets. “At those events, you were able to feel the [pulse] of the market,” he says. “You were able to get an idea of what the major trends were. There was a platform to launch new shows.” Many markets held scaled-down digital versions, but they were not quite the same; some “things you cannot do by one-on-one Zoom pitching.”

Of the formats that buyers were picking up, game shows were particularly popular for several reasons—they are easy to incorporate in a daily strip and can be cost-effective, as “you can get into a studio and shoot three, four, five episodes a day,” Armoza says. Additionally, they appeal to a wider audience, something broadcasters desired as part “of the sociological trends over the pandemic, [leading to] the need for family viewing.”

In 2022, things are starting to shift. “It’s all coming down to the hope of everyone that we are at the end of the pandemic and life will slowly, hopefully, come to be normal again,” he says. “Broadcasters are aware of the fact that they exhausted their current slate of shows, very much in the last two years.” Now, they need new programming to keep their audiences entertained. Across all genres and time slots, “we see increasing demand and a search for new titles,” Armoza notes. “Everybody is looking for something that is noisy, something that stands out of the crowd, something that will be fresh.”

Broadcasters are also looking for cost-effective solutions in order to compete with streamers, Armoza says. As an example, he notes that Armoza Formats is selling technology alongside its formats, such as the CGI-based set of Family Piggy Bank, to make the production of adaptations easier.

With buyers’ post-pandemic needs in consideration, Armoza believes that the base for success in the format industry over the next year “will be the ability to create new shows, bring new creativity and find new production solutions.”