Twentysix to develop BBC interactive mobile

A Twentysix (London and Leeds) product story

Edited by the Marketingservicestalk editorial team Apr 28, 2008

Digital agency twentysix Leeds has won the "Advanced Mobile Interaction with TV Content" category at this year's MIPTV Cross Media Festival competition.

The agency won with its brilliant new concept, Coded Vision, which it is now going forward to develop for the BBC.

Coded Vision beat 37 entries from 12 countries to win its category in this year's MIPTV Content 360 International Digital Pitching Competition.

The competition is all about accelerating digital creativity and attracts the best cross-platform creative concepts from the world's top digital agencies.

Matt Pallatt, technical director at twentysix Leeds, said: "Our idea is based around using a viewer's mobile phone to allow them to interact with new and extended programme content, the basic premise being that programmes would come with bar-coded visuals that can be accessed through 'red button' technology.

"These images can be scanned using a phone's camera and then converted into URLs, which would make accessing related data much easier than typing in URLs on a mobile keypad".

Audiences frequently use their mobile phones while watching TV or engaging with interactive TV services, however there are few opportunities - beyond basic voting - for users to engage in rich interaction using both of these devices at the same time.

Twentysix believes that one of the main reasons for this is that it is difficult to find and access appropriate content, and even more difficult to enter long URLs on mobile phone browsers - Coded Vision aims to remove this barrier.

Gail Dudleston, MD twentysix Leeds, added: "Coded Vision demonstrates twentysix's commitment to driving innovative new concepts and reflects our understanding of how to leverage convergence technology for consumer use.

"We're really excited about the application and developing the concept further for the BBC and other clients".

Twentysix also won the 2006 MIPTV Content 360 International Pitching competition with their idea "Rich Right Click" for the BBC in the Web 2.0: Next-Generation Collaborative Web Concepts category.

That concept dished up contextual content to BBC programming with the right click of a mouse.

The agency was also a finalist in 2007's On Demand category.