The show is made possible thanks to the Me on TV solution, a technology platform owned by Ericsson and developed in partnership with Endemol, a leading television production company, and Dutch technology company Triple IT.

Rocco van den Berg, head of business development and licensing at Endemol, says Me on TV stands out from the competition because it can provide live content to every screen around the world. “We can stream video from a mobile phone and webcam to live TV, any computer, any website, other mobiles and narrowcasting screens used by any kind of company,” he says.

In the case of the Dutch “citizen journalist” show, which has adopted the Me on TV name in the local language, IkOpTV, content sent in by the public is streamed to a server, which is connected to a centrally hosted website. The public is invited to rate and comment on the published content and, every day, the editorial teams working at local stations around the country select the best videos to be screened on TV that evening.

“The TV show presents the video, and through Me on TV, the person who recorded the event is called up to answer questions about what they saw,” van den Berg says.

Endemol has tested Me on TV on some of its own shows. It was first introduced during the Dutch Big Brother final in November last year, where it was used to call up the previous year’s winner to have him speak to the contestants. Without revealing any figures, van den Berg says the initiative was very successful.

Endemol also uses Me on TV for a daytime show called Where am I? in which a reporter using Me on TV is sent somewhere on location in the Netherlands and the viewers have to guess where he is by calling or sending an SMS to the show.

Van den Berg has no doubt that Me on TV is the platform for the future. “Most of the formats we produce today have a user-generated component,” he says.

It does not cost anything to be part of the IkOpTV show because Endemol provides its 300 citizen journalists with mobile phones and pays their phone bills. But van den Berg says this will change as more people want to start sending their content to the website via video telephony. “In the future, you will probably have to pay EUR 0.50 to send your video,” he says, adding that most operators in the Netherlands are starting to introduce a flat fee for a maximum number of videos, which means the cost per user will be low.

“The way our model works now, if you send your content to our Me on TV platform and we resell it to Reuters or the Associated Press, you will get a share of the money we earn,” van den Berg says. “And if your video is very popular, you get points that you can use to buy items from our TV shop.”

The interest in Me on TV has been huge, van den Berg says. “We are in discussions with news agencies, newspapers and production companies as well as almost every telecom operator in the Netherlands,” he says. “As long as we can provide them with an interesting format with this technology included, we can sell it.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen