Red Bee Media creates Orange IPTV indents

Orange is poised to make its first foray into the Internet Protocol Television market, with Red Bee Media.

The IPTV service, which will go under the name of ‘digital TV from Orange’, is due to launch at the end of the year with an identity designed by the digital creative consultancy.

Red Bee Media won a paid creative pitch in March this year against four unnamed groups to create a series of idents for the service, which will offer TV-on-demand.

‘Moving into the TV space is easy, but the challenge was to find a way to incorporate the Orange brand values into a TV context,’ says Tim Pearson, director of digital TV at Orange.

Jonathan Wilson, senior account director at Red Bee Media, explains that the identity was designed specifically with the non-linear format of TV-on-demand in mind. The identity, as a result, aims to be a ‘trusted guide’ that helps viewers navigate their way round content.

‘The idea is that the viewer gets directly to what they want to see, and will find something that captures their imagination along the way. Warmth, engagement and simplicity, these are the key values of the brand,’ says Pearson.

With this in mind, Red Bee Media has created three central characters – Music Roadie, TV Lover and Clapper Board – to represent the service’s three main content categories of music, television favourites and film.

Characters appear in a total of 44 idents, each with different settings and scenes, intended to create a familiar and intuitive navigation system.

Other design devices include Orange’s elliptical orange spotlight, which references the functionality of the button on the IPTV remote control.

Pearson says that the TV service will initially be aimed at home viewers, but there are plans to extend it to viewing for mobiles.

This service will differ in the way it is delivered, he says, because of the way in which it is consumed, which will be more like ‘snacking’, he says.

IPTV OUT THERE

• BT Vision and Tiscali TV already operate in the UK IPTV market. Virgin Media and Smallworld are also planning IPTV services
• France Telecom, Orange’s parent company, reportedly had more than 735 000 IPTV subscribers in its first quarter
• Spanish group Telefónica’s Imagenario has about 419 000 subscribers
• Worldwide IPTV subscriptions at the end of 2006 stood at 7.2 million and generated about £1bn in revenue, according to figures from Infonetics