PRIX EUROPA

Today the Emerging Media category popped onto the surface of the Prix Europa festival. Hosted by the Jury Coordinators Sabine Schade and Kristian Stokholm, in the next three days we will have a close look at a total of 25 projects from all over Europe. And of course, we will extensively discuss them.

With 7 websites on the schedule today, the competition started with the screening and presentation of ZAPP plus by Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) from Germany, the online extension of the TV media magazine ZAPP and a forerunner model for TV-online convergence at the NDR.

Bettina Meier and Philipp Goewe, both Editors, and Software Architect Tobias Kochems introduced their project which started in Spring 2008. The basic idea was to increase transparency and comprehensiveness of the TV format by providing access to the extra-material like documents, whole interviews and links via "hypervideo": with navigable and annotated videos that guide the users with clickable icons.

Logo! is ZDF’s daily newscast for kids, and in election year in Germany, the Logo! Team set up a special website Logo!Wahlcity (Electoral City) to give young children a fun way of discovering what "democracy" and "political parties" are all about. It was 11 and 12 year olds who used it most.

On the site they can play games with a political flavour, and set up their own political parties. The children win points for the various activities on the site - the one with the most points becomes "chairman" of the party.

When setting up their parties, they have to cite its three main aims, and according to ZDF web editor Nadja Stein, protection of the environment, animal welfare, education and freedom issues formed the most popular subjects the children felt strongly about. 7000 parties were formed during the four months the site was up and running during the German election period in 2009, with 2000 still active and attracting regular users to the website.

Red is a website designed by RTE’s Young Peoples department, which uses comedy in a bid to bring the young back into RTE’s orbit. Focussed on sketch comedy, it has seen success through attracting the YouTube generation to sample the comedy set up by the RTE team. Well known YouTube video posters were brought in by RTE to make sketches for the Red website, which links to the YouTubers’ spaces on the YouTube system.

"It’s all about bringing teenagers back to RTE, and giving them somewhere to interact with our comedy" says RTE web producer Aaron Heffernan, who adds the number of hits the site is getting just keeps growing. Charismatic YouTube regulars such as Irishman Shane Dawson have helped RTE pull in the young - and regular opportunities to vote on their favourite performers or sketches also keeps the teenagers coming back.

"Kids love to vote on just about anything, so we give them lots of opportunities to vote. It's an opportunity for interaction by those too shy to post in comment boxes on the site",  says Aaron. Kids also like to see real people doing real things, he says, and Red has some plans to do just that - so watch this space…

The Cooking Club is a website from TV3 Catalunya that features all things to do with Catalan cookery. Featuring over 4000 recipes and cooking clips and tips from TV3’s cookery programmes, past and present, Club de Cuines has become a key website for anyone interested in the cuisine. TV3 has 25 years of archives to draw from, plus new video elements on the site.

Users of the site now upload their own recipes, so a community has developed around the site. 600 recipes were uploaded by the public in the site's first six months. Cooking Club is drawing in 25,000 to 30,000 users a month - more than some programmes get in peaktime on the TV3 channel itself, according to TV3 head of content Ferran Clavell Corbera.

Currently the website is entirely in the Catalan language, but TV2 would like to do an English version, and an app for the iPhone is also under consideration. "Both would appeal to those interested in this particular type of Mediterranean cookery", says Ferran.

The transmedia project In Europa by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO tries to discover new ways of communicating Oral History from the twentieth century across Europe. The project started with a book by writer and historian Geert Mak, later a 35 part documentary series and a radio show was built around it. The website incorporates that material and offers additional content: Pod- and Vodcasts, extras like deleted or behind-the-scene videos and geotagged POIs and Routes on Googlemaps.

Made in Europe, entered by Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company UR, targets at the group of 11 to 12-year old kids: An educational website to be used as a tool in schools. To get to know the different European cultures, each country is represented by a child in video. The website offers interactive exercises, six hours of documentary films and "educational games".

The Web-Duell (Web Competition), entered by ARD.de and co-produced by Fraunhofer-Institut, went online during the last German election campaign. Targeting to indecisive voters, the project tries to provide authentic information by offering a tool, where users can choose a topic and compare the agendas of two politicians taken from TV interviews. To browse the interviews by special key words, Fraunhofer specialists developed a programme that turned audio into text.

Much praise at the end for the projects on display. The discussion revolved mainly around the public value of the projects - if people pay a license fee they shall feel that it's worth it. Controversial was the question of how and to what extent social networks or YouTube can be used for public broadcasting. And then: How to lure people back to the own project.

(Thanks to Nick Radlo, Prix Europa delegate and journalist, Royal Television Society/UK)