(10 March 2008 3:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Germany's Deutsche Telekom has launched the Deutsche Telekom Interactive TV Award.

The competition is aimed at further developing internet-based television, by giving viewers the opportunity to influence events. Greative minds, software developers and people who simply have an interest in television will have four weeks to develop their concepts and submit them by 4 April 2008.

Prize money of EUR 1 million in total will be up for grabs. In organising this competition, Deutsche Telekom is looking to make IPTV more interactive and advance the television of the future with the input of imaginative people.

Deutsche Telekom’s Marc Schröder says, "The Interactive TV Award is the opportunity for creative IPTV minds to turn their ideas into reality. We are inviting the international developer community to help shape the television of the future."

Deutsche Telekom’s broadband IPTV platform, which is based on the high-speed VDSL network with speeds of up to 50 Mbit/s, provides the ideal framework for broadband transmission and interaction for the television of tomorrow, Schröder emphasised. The IPTV competition will give participants the opportunity to develop new ideas and viable concepts in the field of interactive television, have them evaluated, and build up implementation experience on one of Europe’s largest IPTV platforms.

The competition is open to all individuals, groups of people and start-ups, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises and institutions that identify the potential of interactive television and enjoy developing and implementing innovative ideas and creative concepts.

Participants can qualify for the competition by sending in a written proposal for a project before 4 April 2008. The ten participants with the best proposals will each receive EUR 50,000 in cash. They will also have the opportunity to create prototypes of their proposal using the application developer kit. An independent jury will select three of these ten prototypes for the final round.

The decision of the jury will be announced at the IFA, the world’s largest consumer electronics fair. The three finalists will then each receive another EUR 100,000. They will be given the chance to develop their application further in a Deutsche Telekom test environment and present it to the jury. The winner of the competition will be awarded an ultimate prize of EUR 200,000. The jury’s final decision is expected to be announced at the end of January 2009.

Parallel to the developer competition, Deutsche Telekom is also calling on interested customers who enjoy television and wish to contribute their visions to the television of the future to participate. Attractive prizes will be offered in the form of three HDTV flat screen televisions, each with a value of around EUR 1,800.