The Royal Television Society has announced the shortlist for next week’s 2009 RTS Innovation Awards, which are packed full of interesting and potentially far-reaching technical developments.
KEO Digital, Mint Digital and Channel 4’s Landshare, which offers a solution for people who want to grow fruit and vegetables but have no access to land, is shortlisted for the User-Generated Content Award, alongside BBC Wales’ Digital Storytelling project created by Gareth Morlais and Karen Lewis. Mint Digital is nominated again in this category for Sexperience/The Sex Experience Show, with Cheetah Television for Channel 4.
BBC Research & Development is twice short-listed in the Raising the Bar category for its High framerate Television Experiment and Ingex Automated Tapeless Production. BBC Sport and Can Communicate (in association with Inition and Axis) are also in the running with Rugby Live: Calcutta Cup, the world’s first 3D satellite broadcast. This category awards a technique, technology, production device, or programme which sets a new “gold standard” of expectations.
And the BBC and BSkyB go head to head for the Under the Bonnet Award, which recognises a significant advance in the way content is managed or transferred, with BBC Png (Portable Newsgathering Innovation) and Sky+HD Guide. BBC Research & Development is also shortlisted for its contribution to DVB-T2 (Freeview HD).
The RTS Innovation Awards aim to recognise outstanding achievement in the development of new technologies in distribution, production, and manipulation. The award categories are designed to highlight the growing interdependence of technology and content, reaching out to new users and new ways of communicating.
The Awards planning committee is chaired by Jeff Henry, formerly Chief Executive of ITV Consumer. The Awards dinner, which takes place on Tuesday 10 November, will be hosted by Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, founders of Lastminute.com.
