Boomerang (part of the Cartoon Network) asked us to create a site to promote the new series of two of their children's TV shows: 'My Spy Family' and 'Life with Derek'.

In response Codegent designed and built Ask the Cast (www.askthecast.co.uk). The idea was to get children to engage with the characters by allowing them to upload videos of themselves posing questions to the characters in the shows.

Using our FilePipes system, which allows users to easily upload videos either from a webcam or from their phones or videocam and then encodes to flash on the fly, children can record themsleves asking the question and submit it to the site.

Codegent has a wealth of experience working with user-generated content and young people. For Boomerang, we introduced a parental consent stage to uploading the video. Users can rate videos but cannot write comments.

The site has only just been launched and video questions are appearing on the site as they are approved by the Boomerang team.  Once the best questions have been answered, the TV characters will answer them online and on the TV shows.

This is a great example of online and broadcast content working together to create a fun and engaging experience for the audience.

Future of film and tv on the web

We went to a talk last night, given mainly by broadcasters. Predictably the view was that broadcasters had a future in the changing landscape, but that the challenge was really how much they could get down with the kids.

In some ways, a bunch of middle aged men in Soho talking about how 14 year olds are going to be consuming media in a decade's time is probably more about them convincing themselves that they will still have a job then. But it did raise some interesting points.

It is only a matter of time before the broadcast quality of video on the internet, or on mobile phones will become the same quality as TV.  So broadcasters will lose their oligopoly in that sense. Which means they will be left with what? As far as I can see, they will be left with a budget to commission content and hopefully a way of shoe-horning their traditional advertising revenue model into new formats.

But there will be thousands of other people doing the same thing and in the way that YouTube doesn't rely on anything other than a search function and word of mouth, the decision when and what to watch will be impossible for the broadcasters to control on any way near the level they do currently.

The talk ended by everyone saying how exciting it was to be in our industry, and that everything is up for grabs. It IS exciting, but it's also pretty scary and the only certainty is that whatever we think we know or understand about media consumption today will no doubt look hopelessly naive in years to come.

Codegent gets Paxmanned!

We have been working on the online political TV station 18 Doughty Street for the last couple of months and launched phase 1 last week. It seems to have taken off rather quickly and is already getting quite a bit of attention from other parts of the media.

The new campaigns section of the website will be discussed on tonight's edition of Newsnight on BBC2.

"The creators say that the mainstream political process is ignoring huge swathes of public opinion - a niche they propose to fill by running attack adverts (campaigns) sponsoring arguments on both sides of the political debate (or so they say).

Is this the start of a new Americanisation of British politics or have the authors misjudged our political culture?"

Well I guess we will find out the result tonight!

Oooooo its enough to make your eyes water!

Well that is what we are hoping to find out! Codegent have launched a site for Premier Foods to relaunch the Pickled Vegetables range. A UK tour of supermarkets and city centres is currently underway challenging people to try one of the products from the new range and then recording their reactions.

The footage is played live through a plasma screen in the store, and then uploaded to the website a day later.

In addition users can upload or MMS their own pictures to the site to win a prize. Visitors to the site can vote on which of the submitted pictures has the 'Branston Factor'.

The campaign was developed by Sales Promotion agency The Big Kick. The UK tour is being managed by Live Marketing agency Sense and the website streaming is provided by Groovy Gecko.

Branston Factor »

Take One Museum is a six part series for BBC4. Each episode is a 30 minute presenter led journey around a different museum.

For BBC Interactive, we are taking one of those shows and creating an interactive broadband version as a pilot for further interactive television projects in the new year.

The idea is to take the linear TV show and at key moments, give the user the chance to pause and watch further, deeper content. This will effectively make the programme more of a user-led experience.

This is an exciting step in the convergence of digital television and online entertainment and is our eighth project for the BBC in 2005 - we love it!