Reignsoft Kft. -Success in the innovation competition for developers announced by DT

Success in the innovation competition for developers announced by DT

At the beginning of 2008 Deutsche Telekom announced its Interactive TV Award, which is an innovation award for developers. The aim of the competition is no secret: to motivate the implementation of innovative concepts, by means of exploiting the new technical possibilities provided by IPTV, as well as to gather development companies and concept owners dealing with IPTV into communities. 105 applications arrived to the announcement from all over the world. For the second round 10 applicants were selected by the multi-round Evaluating Commission. ReignSoft submitted two concepts, both of them were selected into the second round.

Both of our concepts focus on supporting traditional TV watching.

Sitting in front of the TV, often we cannot decide which channel to choose. Searching, or browsing the programme newspaper consumes considerable time and energy until we choose the programme that is the most appropriate for us from the 50 – or 100 – channels.

Everyone has already experienced the feeling of missing their favourite programmes, and the only reason was not looking at the programme newspaper in time, or not knowing that their favourite film started on another channel when they sat in front of the TV.

The ReignSoft system named IMPRESS monitors the user’s TV watching habits, and creates viewer’s interest profile. Based on the above, the system serves two main applications:

Instant Programme Recommender offers 3 to 9 options from among ongoing programmes.
Automatic recording module runs in the background, and records the programmes that are the most interesting to the user onto the hard disc of the user’s receiver unit.

Thus we do not miss our favourite film, even if we do not want to read the programme newspaper – whether we are sitting in front of the TV or not.

Deutsche Telekom is looking forward to the second round of the competition with great expectations. The total award amount of this round is 300,000 €, which will be awarded to the three best applicants in the second round. The task to be performed by the applicants in this phase is to develop the prototype of their concept, and design the system in detail.

In support of success, ReignSoft joined forces with research group Medialab at the Department of Telecommunication and Media Information Technology of Budapest University of Technology and Economics, which is an internationally recognized scientific workshop of world standard in the field of data mining and recommending systems, providing R+D help for the implementation of the recommending system.

In the first round of the competition we could provide justification of our concept to the Evaluating Commission. Will we succeed in doing so in the second round as well?

For further information, please visit: http://www.interactive-tv-award.com/dev/gewinnen