Center App to Accompany "Celebrity Mole II"

--App is First from the AFI Enhanced TV Workshop to See Deployment
--Is Also the First Enhanced TV App for Media Center

ITV - Tracy Swedlow - editor

ABC is accompanying broadcasts of its reality-TV show, "Celebrity Mole II" (in which 7 celebrities compete in a series of challenges for a $250,000 prize, and attempt to guess which one of them is the "mole" who is trying to sabotage their efforts) with a Flash-based, single-screen, broadcast- synchronized ITV application for Microsoft Media Center PC's. (Note: Microsoft's Windows XP Media Edition operating system is designed to transform the PC into a home entertainment hub. Media Center PC's feature, among other things, a TV tuner and an output that allows content to be displayed on a regular TV. A number of manufacturers, including Dell, Gateway, HP, Sony and Toshiba, are now offering Media Center PC's.)

The app, which was developed under the auspices of the American Film Institute's Enhanced TV Workshop, and which is adapted from a 2- screen app which ABC created for the show, is not only the first enhanced TV app for the Media Center platform, but the first ITV prototype from the AFI ETV Workshop to see national deployment.

It presents viewers with trivia questions, and invites them to take part in polls and to vote on who they think the "mole" is: by passing their cursor over thumbnail headshots of the participants which appear at the bottom of the screen (note: the headshots animate when touched by the cursor), they can see by what percentage of the audience each one is believed to be the mole. A number of companies and organizations (ABC Enhanced TV; interactive media specialists, Zetools and BeyondZ; design specialists, Funny Garbage and Patton Design; digital entertainment consultancy, Convergous; Microsoft's Windows eHome and Microsoft TV divisions; and the Georgia Institute of Technology) participated in the development of the prototype at the AFI ETV Workshop, while Zetools was responsible for transforming the prototype into a broadcast-ready application. [itvt] asked Richard Cardran, Zetools' co-founder and VP of product development, and David Jensen, the company's VP of business development, why the prototype team had decided to develop an ITV app for the Media Center:

"The strength of the Media Center is that you can take a live TV signal, place that signal on top of a flash application, and use it as another object on the page--in other words, you can punch a hole in the Flash application and put the broadcast in it, right beside the content that you are interacting with," Jensen explained. "It's also very flexible, in that there are a lot of tools in the Media Center software developers' kit that allow you to specify ways for people to interact with the broadcast video," Cardran added.

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