July 14, 2003
Roundup on how MMS is being used on Television
The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) claims to have become the first broadcaster in Europe to show MMS-messages from viewers on TV, with two thousand photos shown on TV this weekend, straight after the service was launched on Saturday, according to Europemedia. The debut took place in the programme Svisj, an interactive show where the viewers vote via SMS on which music video to play next.
Actually, -- for the last few months, VitaminaN, a show on Spanish CityTV, has been offering viewers the opportunity to send in their pictures with their text messages (cf «FotoChat» launched on Spanish TV). Viewers can participate in the «FotoChat» service by registering at cityweb.com and uploading their picture. Each time they send an SMS on the chat, their photo will appear automatically next to their own message on the TV screen. Developped by Random One, a mobile and cross-media marketing pioneer in Spain, they claim be the first to deliver true, live interactive programming on television via SMS.
Novel use of MMS and TV, tracked elsewhere on the Web and planet:
-- There was a reality-based adventure TV game show broadcast in China from March to June called The Wedding Race (cf TV Reality Show uses picture phones), where Siemens as a sponsor, provided the contestants with cell phones (S57) and detachable cameras. For each episode, both contestants and the show producers took photos of the competitions and the "behind-the-scenes" during production, but unlike the Norwegian show, they were posted online, not on TV.
-- A popular breakfast show in the UK, GMTV, launched an first MMS service on British television for two weeks in June, delivering Summer Food recipes to viewers' MMS-compatible handsets (cf GMTV launches first fully commercial MMS service).
-- UK viewers of reality TV show Big Brother, allows viewers to send pictures of the housemates with little captions stuck in to the message, via brand new FotoTxt (cf «Big Brother» on your mobile).
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