Avi Armoza reflects on his company’s journey from indie to corporate subsidiary and back again, and the lessons about creative leadership he learned along the way.
Industry veteran Avi Armoza is the founder and CEO of Armoza Formats, one of the most internationally active independent format companies to have emerged from Israel.
He began his TV career as a local producer, launched Armoza Formats in 2005 and built a development and distribution business able to rival the output of far larger companies, on the back of unscripted formats including Still Standing, The Four and I Can Do That.
He sold the company to ITV studios in 2019 and bought it back in 2024, minus the back catalogue. Now, with a blank piece of paper and three decades of experience, he is rethinking what a format company should look like in a fundamentally changed market.
Armoza’s move into development was triggered by watching others fail. When one of the industry’s dominant independent distribution companies, Distraction Formats, collapsed in 2009, he interviewed former employees to understand what had gone wrong.
The lesson was direct. “Being a strong distributor is not enough. The key is the talent of format creation and ownership of IP. Distribution is kind of a commodity,” he says.
From that point, development became the core of the business. The synergy between creation and distribution was deliberate: the team developed shows it knew it could distribute, while its distribution experience helped identify what the market was missing. It was a closed loop, with market intelligence feeding creative decisions and creative output feeding distribution capacity.
Armoza’s insight anticipated what became an industry-wide reckoning. The creative ecosystem model identifies terms of trade as a key structural variable precisely because ownership determines who benefits when a format succeeds internationally. In a market where regulatory protection of creator rights was limited, Armoza’s response was to build a business model less dependent on those protections.
Armoza’s approach to creative risk was shaped by an analogy from outside television: the Israeli high-tech sector. Israel’s start-up culture, with its portfolio investment and explicit tolerance for failure, provided a framework few in the TV industry had articulated so clearly.
“Every format can be like a start-up. Only if you invest in a portfolio of format development can you get success, because two or three shows will fail, some will have modest results and eventually one will give you all the return on investment you want,” says Armoza.
The implication is direct: failure is not an exception to the creative process but a structural feature of it. By framing development as a portfolio, Armoza turned unpredictable individual bets into a collectively manageable risk profile. The question shifts from whether this particular show will succeed – which is unanswerable and therefore a generator of institutional caution – to whether the portfolio contains enough variety and volume to generate a return.
The venture capital framing redefines format development as a portfolio problem rather than a project-by-project bet. Its deeper contribution is structural: it converts the psychological burden of individual failure into a manageable feature of a larger system. The conditions behind Israel’s start-up culture – tolerance for experimentation, acceptance of failure as information and rewards concentrated in the rare large success – are, at root, the same conditions strong creative ecosystems need in television.
Israel’s domestic broadcasting market presented a structural problem no creative talent could resolve. The rights position for producers was weak and, when broadcasters recognised the value of format IP, they captured it for themselves.
Armoza’s response was to bypass the Israeli production system almost entirely, developing formats and producing full pilots independently before taking those pilots directly to international markets and selling options across 10 or 15 territories simultaneously.
The strategy spread risk, retained IP ownership that domestic production would have cost him and built direct international distribution relationships. It was, in effect, a workaround for the absence of rights protection of the kind the UK built through legislation.
But Armoza also shows the limits of individual ingenuity. Israel’s format wave has slowed. As broadcasters entered the distribution space and vertical integration increased, the structural conditions that made his model viable were gradually dismantled.
The creative talent remained. The infrastructure that turned that talent into internationally distributed formats did not. “You need market leaders that will push the market forward. Otherwise, it works less well,” he says.
The example shows that individual strategy can compensate for a weak creative ecosystem, but it cannot replace one. Israel’s slowdown in format exports is not evidence Israeli creativity diminished. It is evidence of what happens when the structural conditions enabling innovation are gradually dismantled. The ecosystem did not run out of ideas. It ran out of the infrastructure that turned ideas into internationally distributed formats.
After buying back Armoza Formats from ITV Studios, which retained the company’s back catalogue but gave the Israeli firm the exclusive right to produce ITV Studios formats in Israel, Armoza is rethinking the business model from scratch. His new slate includes titles such as Family Piggy Bank and The Frame.
His observation about large catalogues is sharp: they create a gravitational pull away from new development. “When you get into a big company, you say, ‘We have something like this, we have something like that.’ A large catalogue makes it hard to invest in genuinely new development,” he says.
Armoza’s current strategy is co-development with partners willing to share IP and bring elements he does not have, primarily the ability to put shows on air. It is a more collaborative model, appropriate to a market where streamers and declining linear revenues have structurally disrupted the traditional territory-by-territory licensing model.
Failure, Armoza argues, is not the exception to a creative career; it is the condition of one. The commercial ability to absorb failure and the mental ability to accept it are, in his view, the two prerequisites for anyone serious about original development.
You learn from what does not work, you get better and then you go again. “There is no creativity without risk-taking,” he says. “And when you take risk, you need to have the ability to fail, both the commercial ability and the mental ability.”