MUMBAI: The world's audiovisual and digital content market MIPTV featuring MILIA announced the 24 finalists for the inaugural 'Content 360' international digital commissioning competition.

Of these finalists, the six winning projects chosen on 6 April, will share €80,000 in development funding.

Sponsored by Vodafone and organized in partnership with the BBC, the Korean Broadcasting Commission (KBC) and the National Film Board of Canada, Content 360 is a new initiative to commission innovative content and interactive applications for mobile and broadband.

Launched on 17 January 2006, the inaugural Content 360 attracted 181 entries from 120 companies and 23 countries. "The number of entries underlines the need to provide development funding for projects which are embracing user demand for new kinds of content and services in a digital, multi-platform world," notes MILIA director Ted Baracos. "What's been especially welcome has been the extraordinary quality of the projects, which has made the initial selection of the 24 finalists very hard."

The finalists are competing in six separate categories :

- Long Tail Content: Navigating the BBC Archive. BBC digital commissioners will choose the project which makes best use of BBC archives on new platforms.

- Animation Projects for Mobile Platforms: The National Film Board of Canada will select an innovative mobile animation project for co-production. The judges will also take into consideration production and distribution business models.

- Web 2.0: Next Generation Collaborative Web Concepts. Blogs, feed readers, social networks, P2P, audio and video podcasting... In the digital world, everyone is a creator and a distributor. The BBC will select the most innovative project in this field.

- DMB -Digital Multimedia Broadcasting: Mobile Content and Applications: This category is designed to reward content innovation specific to mobile TV broadcasting.

- Rich Media-Made for Mobile: The BBC will judge the best proposal for rich media which pushes the boundaries for mobile content experiences.

- Total Mobile & User-Generated Mobile Content: BBC digital commissioners will select the best idea which marries user-generated content with interactivity between the user and the content distributor.

In conjunction with the competition, Content 360 will have a dedicated pavilion within MIPTV featuring MILIA providing networking opportunities and a showcase for the finalists.