Interactive TV Award - Blog zum Interactive TV Award der Deutschen Telekom

Award Log / At a workshop the “Developer” finalists acquired the requisite know-how for the hot phase of the contest. Award host Klaus Greiber describes what happened on those two days and how we will proceed from there.

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Things are hotting up as we enter the most exciting phase of our competition. Following last week´s jury decision, attention turned to our finalists. Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to information gathering: a workshop was held on the Microsoft Mediaroom Presentation Framework (MPF), the development environment used for Entertain, Deutsche Telekom´s IPTV solution. There was also an opportunity for the finalists to present their own TV ideas to their fellow competitors in greater detail, enabling them to do a little networking.

Always ready with a story and a smile, Microsoft trainer Richard Warren took the workshop members on a speed tour of the features and options available with MPF. An expert in his field, the Briton had traveled to Darmstadt from the US for the workshop (he was then traveling onward to Finland) in which he revealed numerous details to the winning teams about cool things like “event handlers”, “triggering” or the “PhysicsGrid”, something that is very popular at present in the video-on-demand store.

Things got a bit more nerdy in a few of the illustrative examples chosen, such as the zoom function for a screen-in-screen function. The point here was that both screens were black. Admittedly this had little or nothing to do with the colorful content of our Entertain program, which easy for anyone to use, from tiny tots to their doting grandparents, but as we all know, clever programmers need to be allowed a bit of fun, don´t they?

A second part of the workshop program that proved very fruitful was the presentation of the competition ideas by the various teams. Sevenload explained its community concept and how it brought TV and Facebook closer together. The TeraVolt team demonstrated its solution that would enable Formula One viewers to follow racetrack duels “up close and personal” from the vantage point of their choice. Their colleagues from IpAppMedia had two TV ideas to show off: their TV betting application, allowing viewers to place bets on the result of the next penalty kick, and their BabyCam app, which may also have potential as a security app for monitoring homes.

Unfortunately the team from Delivery Agent in Denver, USA was unable to join us: too little time and too far away. We would have loved to get to know them and their TV shopping-application in person, but they assured us that they were already extremely well versed in MPF.

The workshop certainly gave everyone a chance to find out what their fellow competitors were taking with them to the final jury session and enabled them to gather a little feedback. By the way, we´re going to tell you more about the various projects in this blog over the coming weeks.

However, the atmosphere in our workshop was remarkably uncompetitive. On the contrary, I was very pleased to see the participants getting along so well together. There is no doubt that the extended dinner we enjoyed together played a significant role here, affording people plenty of time to get to know one another better. I´m already looking forward to offering the competitors practical support and advice in the coming weeks. Of course the same also goes for our “Freestyle” winners, who will be (unlinke our “Developers“) making their ideas a reality without using MPF.

Klaus Greiber…

… likes his task as a project manager of Deutsche Telekom Interactive TV Award for the variety and because of its strategic aspects. He organizes the innovation contest and keeps it running. From his Twitter timeline we learn that he is also a sports-mad fan of Austrian motorbikes and of Cologne carnival.