Media Mutations 9

MEDIA MUTATIONS 9. THE FORMAT FACTOR

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Organized by
Luca Barra and Paola Brembilla

in collaboration with Andrea Esser, the Media Across Borders network
and the ECREA Television Studies section

Free entrance

Media Mutations, the international conference on audiovisual media, comes to its ninth edition. This year’s theme is the cultural and industrial role of global formats in television production, distribution and viewing practices.

In the last fifteen years, following a long history that already started in the early years of the medium, television around the world has been constantly and successfully broadcasting global formats. Beginning with Big Brother, Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and later with The X Factor, Masterchef, Peking Express, In Treatment, The Bridge, Pulseras Rojas and many others, formatted shows have contributed to the creation of a shared television aesthetics, spreading best practices in production, distribution and marketing, and increasing genre proximity across the world. At the same time, differences and national specificities are still at work, and the success of global formats in individual national markets depends on their successful localization. The process of formatization is now used in both TV fiction and entertainment production, and it is relentlessly expanding, both at the economic and cultural level, and in a convergent media scenario.

The conference aims to expand academic knowledge on this phenomenon, establish new research perspectives in the field, and strengthen our understanding of national and transnational distribution and reception practices. The focus will be on cultural and linguistic format issues, on legal, economic and productive aspects of format development and format trade, and on the different genres and types of formatted audiovisual products.

site: www.mediamutations.org