ITV-Inter Medya’s Foray into Formats

Pelin Koray, sales executive at ITV-Inter Medya, talks to TV Formats Weekly about its production and international marketing of entertainment formats, a new line of business for the company.

After several years of successfully selling scripted fare (notably, Turkish dramas) to the global market, ITV-Inter Medya recently decided it was time to try something new. Rather than becoming a competitor to its content suppliers by producing dramas, the Istanbul-based company chose to begin creating a variety of game-show formats for international distribution.

Among the seven newly developed formats from ITV-Inter Medya is Answer If You Can, which asks contestants to respond to general-knowledge questions while performing physical tasks based on their fears or habits. “It has strong visuality and a colorful studio design, so it is really different from ordinary quiz shows,” says Pelin Koray, sales executive at the company.

There is also Celebrities in the Kitchen, a cooking program that looks on as famous personalities train with culinary professionals on weekdays and then work in a restaurant-type setting during the weekends. “They need to serve the customers from A to Z—as the waiters, dishwashers, chefs, bartenders, etc.,” says Koray. “The interesting part of this show is that the public will vote [for the] celebrities and we can see them in a way that we have never seen before.”

Then there is The League, a quiz show focused on such team sports as soccer, basketball, football, baseball, cricket, hockey and rugby. “It will be performed between the fans of the teams from the top leagues of the countries in which it is broadcast,” says Koray. “So, if football is the [most] popular sport in a country, the studio will be designed like a stadium.” Koray notes that the program will run simultaneously with the league’s entire season. “For instance, if the league lasts for 34 weeks and there are three matches in a day, then the show will be broadcast during those 34 weeks with three challenges in a day.”

At the moment, negotiations are ongoing for these paper formats with TV channels in Turkey. Once they are sold into the country, Koray is confident that international sales will follow. “Foreign companies are really interested, and if we finalize a negotiation with them before the broadcasters in Turkey, the production companies will be our partners on those shows as we will be able to promote our products more efficiently with their footage,” she says. ITV-Inter Medya is also open to representing third-party formats in addition to developing its own.

“We just launched our format catalogue at MIPCOM in October,” says Koray. “Within three months we came a really long way. In the future, we would like to categorize our catalogue depending on the budgets, and we want to have at least 20 formats in our catalogue within the next 12 to 18 months. Our creative team works with this aim, and we are also evaluating some formats we received for distribution.”