SBS has become the first national Australian broadcaster to be involved with interactive television, announcing it has joined the ranks of ICE Interactive's regional iTV pilot in country NSW.
"It's very important for SBS to be able to distribute content through any new channel," Will Berryman, head of new media at SBS, told ZDNet.
"The [Orange] pilot is a great way of learning where we can take our content and how we can deploy content through different technology," Berryman added.
Whilst regional broadcaster WIN Television is ICE's lead broadcaster, on a national level SBS is " a great opportunity for us to focus on diverse cultural content," ICE Interactive MD, Carl Braden, said. "It tunes us for international expansion," he added.
The pilot scheme, which commenced this month, involves the participation of 150 homes that have access to interactive television through the provision of set top boxes by ICE.
Intensive three-month piloting will run through until the end of January - although an extension of the pilot scheme has been earmarked by some affiliated partners, according to Braden.
"We're the type of company that doesn't engage in partnerships short term," Braden said.
"We see a significant opportunity to support a large broadcasting initiative," he added. "The manner in which we work with partners is when there's a mutual desire to continue and extend and look at other opportunities," Braden added.
However, a longer-term partnership "would have to be subject to good investigation," Berryman said. "It's early days yet."
All-in-all, the pilot, including network connectivity, back-end infrastructure costs and market research, is valued at between AU$3 million and AU$5 million.
Partnerships are on a commercial basis, "this is not a free ride," Braden said.
ICE is using the pilot as an opportunity to test software and infrastructure, and to get an end-to-end understanding of what the issues of the user will be, Braden said.
The pilot, which also delivers highly relative information on demographic profiles, peak periods and advertorial success, is also the prime opportunity for partners to look at ways to commercially move downstream, Braden added.
"iTV, for some reason, is behind the rest of the world in Australia," Braden said. "It's very much like the early days of the Internet except everyone has a television and the TV is widely adopted across every demographic."
"The pilot is a way of saying, 'if we can do it in a small town in the middle of NSW, we can do it anywhere'," Braden added.
