V4x Powers Interactivity for French Reality Show, "Nouvelle Star"

French interactive TV technology provider, V4x (note: the company's flagship product is its V4x Interactive Factory platform, which it bills as enabling the creation, management and delivery of synchronized contextual interactivity for video, and as offering a set of authoring tools and the backoffice infrastructure for delivering video channels and interactive services to multiple platforms, including Adobe Flash, Air and Flashlite and the iPhone and Blackberry smartphones; its customers include Orange FT, Portugal Telecom, Luc Besson's production company EuropaCorp, and Antena3), announced Wednesday that M6 Web, the Internet arm of French commercial broadcaster Metropole Television Group, is using its technology to power Web- and mobile-based two-screen interactive TV services for the reality show, "Nouvelle Star" (which, according to the company, is the French equivalent of "American Idol"). The service's offerings include chat, polls and play-along games. "V4x allows us to provide a true, multimedia experience that melds television with online and mobile in a very compelling way, and we're pleased with the heightened level of audience participation," Christian Bombrun, M6 Web's deputy managing director, said in a prepared statement. "With V4x we can easily leverage content simultaneously to multitasking teens and young adults who watch TV while chatting on the Web. The V4x toolkit powers our media 360-degree monetization strategy with live social interaction polls, quizzes and chats running in parallel with our primetime shows."