productioninterview
Gogglebox Mongolia, All3Media International
Formats Outlook: 2021
The Voice Kids Thailand, ITV Studios
Angkara Cinta, ABS-CBN
Pharaoh!, Nippon TV
2020 is never going down in history as new and original programming’s finest year. But the recovery has started and we’re looking at schedules and pipelines that have everything from premium scripted adaptations to studio game shows and ongoing appetite for local versions of proven formats including ITV Studios’ The Voice and MBC Korea’s Masked Singer. For the first update of ContentAsia’s Formats Outlook in 2021, we spoke to 20 of the world’s most active right holders about what they had on air in 2020, what happened in Q1 of 2021 and what they think is most likely to happen next.
Even before Covid-19, Asia’s formats environment by volume was shrink-
Korea’s Masked Singer and CJ ENM’s I Can See Your Voice into interna-
ing. ContentAsia’s Formats Outlook tracked 337 in Asia in 2018. This con-
tional markets.
tracted to about 311 by the end of 2019. 2020 – of course unsurprisingly
The most obvious trends include the ongoing appetite for premium
– saw the number of new shows based on acquired formats on air or
scripted formats, driven mostly by streaming demand and by channel
commissioned dip radically.
successes such as The World of the Married in Korea; East-West co-devel-
Our most optimistic estimates, based on interviews in March 2021 with
opment, such as those between the U.K.’s ITV Studios and Japan’s top
20 formats rights holders and distributors working across Asia, is that there
commercial broadcaster Nippon TV on family entertainment game show
were no more than 200 new/commissioned titles in 2020.
Stacking It announced in March this year; the unscripted development
The top 20 companies report 154 formats on air or commissioned from
initiatives between Dentsu’s international content unit, The Story Lab,
the beginning of 2020 to the end of Q1 2021, with signs of recovery as
and both Nippon TV (9 Windows) and Fuji TV (announced February 2021,
pandemic containment measures lift and strong activity in two areas –
first title in development); and partnerships with Chinese broadcast gi-
scripted and energy going into developing titles that can follow MBC
ant, Hunan TV, which has fine tuned its home-grown IP to be more in line
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contentasia april 2021