Keshet's Format Licensing Engine — Why Israeli TV Travels
Keshet International has built the most successful television format-licensing business out of any small-country broadcaster. The model is replicable in principle and almost impossible in practice.
Keshet Media Group, originally a domestic Israeli commercial broadcaster, has spent two decades building Keshet International — a London-based subsidiary that licenses Israeli-originated television formats globally. Hatufim became Homeland. BeTipul became In Treatment. Beauty and the Baker, Boom, Rising Star, and dozens more have been remade across major and mid-tier broadcast markets. Keshet International has been, for a decade, the most successful format-licensing engine of any small-country broadcaster.
What makes the model work
- Format-first development. Keshet's domestic Israeli productions are commissioned with international licensing potential explicitly in mind. The Israeli production budget is treated as the format development cost; the global licensing revenue is the real economics.
- Distribution-side capability. Keshet International is staffed with international format-sales executives who understand each major buyer's programming gap, broadcaster regulatory environment, and competitive set.
- Co-production muscle. Keshet Studios (US-based) co-produces remakes rather than purely licensing. This captures more economics on the most successful formats.
- A national talent base optimized for it. Israeli writers and showrunners increasingly write with the format-licensing arc in mind. The pattern is self-reinforcing.
Why it's hard to replicate
- Scale matters. Below a certain volume of original Israeli production, there isn't enough format inventory to support a global sales operation. Keshet had the domestic broadcasting scale to subsidize the international build-out for a decade before it became profitable on its own.
- The Hebrew-language origination is an accidental moat. Hebrew-language origination means buyers are licensing a tested format without being constrained by an English-language original — they can do their own localization without competing with the original on home turf. This is structural, not strategic.
- The post-streaming environment changes the economics. Global streamers are increasingly commissioning originals directly from Israeli production companies, bypassing the format-licensing layer. This is good for Israeli production but a partial substitute for Keshet International's historical revenue model.
The Keshet model has been studied by Argentine, Korean, and Turkish broadcasters. None has fully replicated it. The closest analog — the Korean drama / K-content global rise — operates on a fundamentally different commercial structure (originals-led, streamer-distributed, government-subsidized).