Irish firm develops interactive television programme in Russia

A RUSSIAN interactive television show has been developed by Irish media firm Phonovation following a €2 million investment.

Phonovation provides technology for interactive television and its clients include Today FM, RTÉ, TV3, E4, Vodafone, Pfizer and the Department of Education and Science.

It is the first foray for the company into the market outside Ireland and Britain. The company picked Russia as there is huge potential there for interactive programming and because of the size of the market.

Phonovation managing director Paddy Woods said: “We are very pleased with the success of the first suite of quiz programmes which have gone to air in Russia. The market potential for viewer response, interactive programming is enormous and hence we have decided to roll out additional viewer response based programmes in the market.”

The first one-hour programme ran on Moscow station Stolitsa for an initial trial period of nine days.

Further television formats are currently being produced and will be introduced to the Russian market over the next 3 months.

Phonovation produced the programmes in association with Russian partner Teleshop.ru and provides the technology response mechanisms through hosted infrastructure based in London.

The show is produced in London, with the live feed sent to Moscow for transmission via satellite.

The viewer participation calls are answered and handled by a local service provider which also manages the prize fulfilment.

The Dublin-based company was established in 1988 and has 12 employees. As well as offering traditional phone response services, it provides multimedia and messaging services including SMS, 3G and interactive voice response (IVR) which are tailored for clients’ specific requirements.

The company also announced yesterday the appointment of Gavin Carpenter as sales director. He was previously Colt Telecom’s wholesale sales manager for Ireland.