A
QUEENSLAND-BASED mobile content developer has created Australia’s first
animated series able to be seen across mobile phone, television and
internet screens.

Mobile
content company Moket initially created Dojo Monkey, an animated series
about a ninja monkey, as part of a video game, but managing director
Dale Rankine saw the potential for it to exist across several
platforms.

INTERNET
publishers are under pressure to spend up to $10million to fund a new
ratings system that would allow advertisers to compare online audiences
with those for television, radio and other media.

While
advertisers spent close to $1.4 billion on all forms of internet
advertising last year, there is still no single audience measurement
system that all publishers agree on, the online equivalent of newspaper
readership or TV ratings.

If broadly applied to Australia this would lead to internet advertising growing to $2.6 billion by as early as 2010.

BRISBANE-based
digital entertainment company Hoodlum has created the world’s largest
online television drama to promote the fourth season of the hit Seven
Network program Lost, created by US television network ABC.

The
US network is understood to have spent up to $3 million to fund the
online drama and global viral advertising campaign called Find 815,
which stars Australian actors Rodger Corser, who appears in Nine’s
gangland drama Underbelly, and Aden Young.

FROM web video to the writers’ strike fallout, industry heavyweights are saying 2008 will be big.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation and its British counterpart,
the BBC, have signed an agreement with MySpace allowing the use of
their video content on the social networking website.

AUSTRALIAN
audiences are missing out on media choice available across the globe
because of our "disgusting" broadband infrastructure, says Warner Bros’
Malcolm Dudley-Smith.

As executive vice-president of
sales and business development for Warner’s International Television
Distribution arm, the Los Angeles-based Australian sells television
shows such as Without a Trace and Cold Case to networks across Canada, Latin America and Asia.

Warner Bros has a longstanding output agreement with Nine and the
lack of better US content has been one of the factors in its lower
ratings this year.

"We certainly let them down a bit last year but we don’t feel so
guilty; we felt pretty good about helping them to get to No1 in the
first place," Mr Dudley-Smith said. "If you look at the top shows
they’re almost all produced (in Australia) anyway."

And while the content behemoth considers broadband and internet TV a
high priority in Europe, South Korea and Japan, that’s not the case in
Australia.

"Especially throughout Asia, IPTV is going to be a huge opportunity for audiences and producers alike," he said.

But they weren’t "pushing too hard into online in Australia" due to the country’s slow roll-out of high-speed broadband.