The winners of the Interactive TV Award 2011 have been declared.

On the 11th of February in Bonn a renowned jury comprising of technology and media experts chose the best ideas for “TV of the future” in two categories. A sports bet application won the “Developer” award and a TV community concept received the creative “Freestyle” trophy. Winners and runners-up received a total cash prize of 70,000 Euro.

“BetWorld” by IpAppMedia, a media consulting company based in Zurich, was the best concept based on Microsoft’s technical development platform “Mediaroom Presentation Framework”. The application brings sports betting to the television.

The award for the most creative award entry went to “TV together” by Oliver Caron, a web design freelancer from Ratheim in Germany. His concept allows friends to link up by webcam so that they can see each other and chat while watching TV.

The second and third-placed entries were the “Interactive Formula 1” by TeraVolt from Hamburg and the “Contextual Shopping App” by Delivery Agent from Denver.

Jury President Christian P. Illek, Director of Marketing of Deutsche Telekom Germany, showed himself satisfied about the outcome of the innovation contest: „The entries of the Interactive TV Award 2011 covered a wide range of topics. Many of them hit the bull’s eye of what we want to achieve for Entertain – an emotional interactive television. Not only the winners delivered strong answers. Altogether this is a real success for our innovation contest and an excellent point of departure for continuing our combined efforts for future TV.“

Additional jurors are Andreas Müller-Schubert, Director of TV, Video & Music Platforms at Microsoft Germany, Robert Amlung, Digital Representative at the German national Television Station “Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen”. Representative of the specialized press were: Stefan Goedecke, Managing Director of Auerbach Publications, and the media scientist Thomas Hess, head of the Institute for Business Informatics and New Media at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.

The jury selected the winners on Friday, almost seven months after the start of the competition. In all, there were eight concepts in the finals; these were divided into two categories from which the jury had to select one winner in each category. For the “Freestyle” category, only the creativity of the concept is judged without considering any technical requirement. The technical prize category of “Developers” on the other hand, required a demonstrator of a technically feasible interactive TV application. Contestants were expected to develop new interactive TV concepts within the technical possibility available on the so called “Mediaroom Presentation Framework”.

Today Deutsche Telekom’s Entertain offers a wide variety of interactive functions at the push of a button. This involves the interactive LIGA total! for soccer fans, an online video library “Videoload” and a very extensive TV archive. Moreover, recordings for the integrated Video recorder can be programmed on every computer as well smart phones devices which are connected to the internet. Additionally, Entertain also offers the opportunity to halt a running program at anytime, to either save or to program for subsequent recordings.