MUMBAI: The recently concluded television event in Cannes, France MipTV featuring Milia had an attendance of 12,249 participants, compared to 12,163 in 2005.
Company participation rose to 4,201 from 4,138 last year, while the number of acquisition executives in Cannes was 3,565, a five per cent increase on the 2005 level of 3,393.
Reed Midem's television division director Paul Johnson says, "MipTV featuring MILIA 2006 saw a significant rise in the number of companies and executives coming from the digital sector, particularly IPTV, mobile and interactive television specialists. Our figures show that we welcomed some 1,800 companies from the Internet and mobile sectors.
"Our conference programme and a series of new initiatives such as Content 360 and the International Interactive Emmy Awards, reflect the changes taking place in the industry. MipTV featuring MILIA is not just a television market, it's a content market."
The event had 45 sessions and over 170 speakers. For the first time ever, the conference programme welcomed seven keynote speakers, including AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller, reality television producer Mark Burnett, BBC new media head Ashley Highfield, FremantleMedia's Gary Carter, Takeshi Natsuno of NTT DoCoMo and Erik Huggers of Microsoft.
Miller at the event announced that AOL had brought programming originally produced for its Internet video channels and was selling the shows to traditional broadcasters.
A highlight of MipTV was the inaugural International Interactive Emmy Awards, organised by the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and Reed Midem. This is the first time that an Emmy Awards ceremony has taken place outside the US. A gala dinner, hosted by Desperate Housewives star Roger Bart.
Among the other new initiatives launched in 2006, Content 360 set out to commission innovative content and interactive applications for mobile and broadband. Organised in partnership with the BBC, the Korean Broadcasting Commission and the National Film Board of Canada, Content 360 rewarded six company projects and provided €80,000 of development funding to be divided between the winners.
For the first time in MipTV's history, the annual Lifetime Achievement Award was attributed not to an industry individual but to a whole company, in the form of Japanese production powerhouse TOEI. TOEI Company chairman Tan Takaiwa and TOEI Animation chairman Tsutomu Tomari accepted the tribute on behalf of the entire TOEI group.
Now in its ninth year, the two-day Mipdoc documentary and factual programme screenings, which precede MipTV, saw a 14 per cent rise in participation with 438 companies from 57 countries attending. Production and sales companies sent 1,192 programmes to the digital screening library, of which 769 were appearing at a market for the first time.
