Shooting to TV stardom
Next month GMTV viewers will be able to get on TV just by using their camera phones. So is this the way forward for interactive TV, asks Justin Pearse
As the Big Brother housemates enjoy their 15 minutes of fame, broadcaster GMTV is planning to offer its six million daily viewers a slightly more modest prospect: five seconds of photo-fame.
Next month the breakfast TV station will become the latest broadcaster to enable viewers with camera phones to interact directly with the show through picture messaging (MMS). The best photos sent in will be displayed on-screen around editorial items such as "back to school", with viewers able to show off their children in their first school uniform to the nation.
"People want to see themselves on screen," says GMTV head of interactive Nog Sawdon. "We already have text messaging to screen, this gives viewers their chance to get on TV, to get their five seconds of photo-fame."
The past few years have seen broadcasters embrace text messaging as a hugely successful way to add interactivity to programes, with everything from voting to on-screen text chat. The evolution of 160-character black and white SMS to MMS, with the ability to add photos, sounds and even video, offers broadcasters far more powerful potential to add mobile interactivity to formats.
A comparatively tiny number of consumers own camera phones. According to figures released by the Mobile Data Association in June, there were 11m MMS phones in the UK as of March, giving a penetration rate of 24%. But with mobile operators pouring millions into marketing campaigns to promote next-generation handsets, growth is rising quickly and broadcasters are starting to jump on board.
Giving viewers a way to become a visual part of the programme they're watching is an exciting prospect for viewers and broadcasters alike.
"It's a great opportunity to get content from your audience at very short notice," says Celador's head of digital Bruce Vandenberg. This year 10,000 viewers signed up for Channel 4's first Big Brother picture alerts. However, Andy Taylor, head of C4's interactive division 4Interactive, reveals the broadcaster also used the series to trial its first MMS-to-screen services.
"On some Big Brother's Little Brother shows we offered the ability for viewers to send their photo in to be displayed on screen alongside their text messages. It was a toe in the water for us," he says. "It will definitely take off. People love to see themselves on screen."
The first to take the leap was the BBC, back in April. Viewers of the BBC3 Johnny Vaughan vehicle Live at Johnny's were encouraged to send in picture messages of themselves to be praised or ridiculed on the Theme of the Day section. Although numbers were low, the corporation was encouraged enough to put MMS at the heart of its primetime Saturday night BBC1 show Johnny and Denise - Passport to Paradise, a Celador production.
Viewers were again asked to MMS photos into the studio, with Johnny and Denise ad-libbing around the best ones live on air at the end of the show. BBC controller of business development and emerging platforms Angel Gambino this week revealed that the first show saw 8,000 photos submitted by the audience.
"This was very encouraging," says Hugh Griffiths, head of data at O2, which ran the service for the show in conjunction with MX Telecom. "This is a new medium and as the penetration of MMS continues to climb we'll see increased usage. The extent to which people want to be creative with pictures is pretty limitless."
At the BBC, Gambino is pleased with its experiments but says work to determine how to integrate picture messaging into programming formats is only just beginning.
"The numbers did drop throughout the series so we have to work out why," she says. "Is this just about novelty or can we make it part of a more entertaining format. For instance, broadcasters need to look at the peer-to-peer aspects of MMS, building a community around a show by sharing images."
What's clear is that broadcasters are quickly starting to understand the potential of MMS, that it's not merely a more colourful form of text messaging but can become an integral part of the creativity of the show.
ITV recently integrated picture messaging into its Sunday afternoon motorsport show Speed Sunday, filling the screen with images such as viewers' kids dressed in full formula one kit. ITV head of mobile Jane Crossley says she's noticed MMS changing the perception of mobile interactivity by production teams, which often resisted including SMS in programming in its early days. "There is an enthusiasm to embrace it, which is the difference effected by a visual medium," she says.
This week Endemol is set to announce its first show using inbound picture messaging. But director of interactive media Peter Cowley believes such applications are only scratching the surface of what picture messaging offers to broadcasters.
"I applaud the BBC for pioneering MMS, but with Johnny and Denise it seemed like a bit of a bolt-on rather than really adding anything to the theme of the show," he says. "This is such a rich form of media on mobile and it's much better for viewers to be able to receive content from the show itself."
Endemol recently announced plans to launch a soap opera built for MMS. The 16-week comic-strip-style series, FanTESStic, is set to launch in the next few months. "This is an experiment to see how rich content works on the phone," says Cowley. "People will be able to interact in ways such as voting for an outfit for the heroine to wear, then receiving a picture of it back to their phone, so they feel there's value in participating."
Mersey TV is planning to go one step further in the integration of MMS and broadcast media, with the launch of an MMS spin-off of Hollyoaks, developed with Opera Telecom. The series will use characters from the show, building on storylines from the TV series. The action will be portrayed, like a picture book, with a "slide-show" of five picture messages.
"This is a fantastic way to provide extra value to your audience," says Cowley. "Broadcasters need to come up with more creative ways to use MMS to add value to all of a show's two million viewers rather than just the fame of the ones that send photos in."
At Celador, Vandenberg also believes the multimedia capabilities of MMS allow broadcasters to leverage the strength of existing shows, creating new media channels that give extra value to the viewer as well as new revenue streams for the company.
"We want to build a number of propositions around CD:UK for instance, with the possibility of backstage pictures of the bands appearing on the show sent to your phone as a subscription service," he says.
However, it's not all about images. C4's Taylor points out that the unlimited amount of text a MMS message can display means broadcasters can provide far more compelling content to their viewers than with the 160 character limits of SMS.
"We want to extend all our SMS services, such as news, cricket and style tips alerts, to MMS. You can send a real news article now," he says.
The possibilities for broadcasters seem limitless. With the drop in interactive TV voting for Big Brother this year - down to 2.8m from 5.3m last year - highlighting the lethargic approach of the public to the medium, mobile multimedia offers the TV community perhaps its best interactive opportunity
mediaguardian
