contest

[itvt] can today reveal the winners of the Mediaroom Application Contest that Microsoft held at its 3rd Annual Mediaroom Developers Conference last month (note: Mediaroom is Microsoft's IPTV platform, which the company says has now been deployed in over 4 million subscriber households worldwide, by a customer base that includes AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom and Portugal Telecom, among others).

In order to mark the 20th anniversary of its satirical cartoon series, "The Simpsons," the Fox broadcast network plans to hold its first ever "on-air scavenger hunt." From November 9th through 13th, viewers will be encouraged to watch the network each night to find "Simpsons" references, shout-outs, tributes and clues (e.g., "House" star, Hugh Laurie, holding a can of Duff beer) incorporated into its primetime programming and on-air promos.

The San Francisco Ballet--which claims, in addition to being the oldest professional ballet company in the US, to have been the first to perform "The Nutcracker"--on Monday launched a "Magical Memories Nutcracker Video Contest." The contest invites ballet enthusiasts to create a video that reenacts or reimagines a magical scene from "The Nutcracker" or that depicts a favorite memory of the ballet, and then post it on YouTube. Because the San Francisco Ballet is this year celebrating the 65th anniversary of its first performance of "The Nutcracker," it is stipulating that video submissions must be 65 seconds in length.

GoAnimate, a company which offers an online platform that is billed as making it easy for anyone to create their own animations, announced last week that it is making its platform available via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, so that companies can deploy its animation capabilities on their own Web sites in order to increase "brand interaction." "For the last year at GoAnimate.com, we have been helping major brands from hip-hop stars like Akon to major movie franchises like 'Star Trek' to give their fans an entirely new way to interact with them via their own customizable animations," GoAnimate founder and CEO, Alvin Hung, said in a prepared statement.

Deutsche Telekom, which operates a Microsoft Mediaroom-powered IPTV service called T-Home Entertain, is set to begin its annual interactive TV development contest, the Deutsche Telekom Interactive TV Award, next month. In addition to cash prizes with a combined value of 110,000 Euros, the contest will offer select winners and finalists the chance to work with Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft in order to realize their interactive TV projects.

The contest will offer three main awards:

boxee says that a range of new applications have been developed for its over-the-top-TV platform since it launched an API for the platform earlier this year and announced the boxee App Dev Challenge, a competition designed to encourage developers to build new applications using the API (note: for more on the App Dev Challenge, see the article published on itvt.com, May 5th). The new apps, many of which can be found in boxee's App Box repository, include: