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Nearly one in two Athenians spends five hours per day in front of the television while just over 55 percent of Athenians do not participate in any form of exercise, according to a survey made public yesterday.

The survey, conducted by the Hellenic Medical Association for Obesity and sports group Europe Corporate Games, showed that 46 percent of respondents admitted to watching at least five hours of television per day.

The survey sample was 403 white-collar workers, including 178 women, employed at different companies in Athens.

The majority, 55 percent, exercise less than 100 minutes per week and use their own means of transport to get around the city, even to cover short distances, according to the study.

2waytraffic International has shored up deals for its young-adult-skewing interactive game-show format TXTC with Greece’s Mega Channel.

TXTC, targeted at teenagers and under-25s, pits two teams against each other to challenge their texting skills. The two four-member teams compete in fast-moving rounds by typing their answers into giant mobile phones using their feet, earning “talktime” as they advance, to be used in the final round where one team plays for a prize. The studio-based format, which was recently acquired by 2waytraffic, features two larger-than-life-sized mobile phones built into the studio floor that contestants can use to text their answers. The format was created by Tony Dortie for Triple T Entertainment, and has aired on SCTV in Thailand and Indonesia and HTV in Vietnam.

Under the new agreements, Greece’s Mega Channel’s weekly series, known as Sumusu, launched earlier this month, already winning 50 percent of the 15 to 24 demographic.

Cyprus’ IPTV provider PrimeTel has launched an interactive TV application called VBox, which allows users to create their own individual on-demand music channel on their set-top box.

Viewer have access to a library of music video clips, both Greek and International, divided into music categories such as Greek, pop, laika, international, rock, and ballads. Users can make their choices and add up to 20 clips to the playlist they create. Playlists can also be saved for future use. Additionally users can access pre-made collections and lists created by various music producers.

VBox is an interactive application that runs on the set-top box and is accessed through the PrimeTV on-screen menu. The majority of the processing is performed on the PrimeTV video server, where the entire music video database is also saved. When the user has finished specifying the music selection, the list of songs is saved on the box and is transmitted to the video server for the execution of the requested search. When the user starts playing the playlist, the STB sends the command to the server, which in turn streams the content exclusively to the user who has sent the request.

Related Links > http://www.prime-tel.com/Main/default.aspx

Sophocles Tasioulis, one of the producers who convinced the BBC of the merits of ‘Earth’

  Producer Sophocles Tasioulis (left) with one of the ‘Earth’ directors, Alastair Fothergill, the other is Mark Linfield.

The most expensive production in the history of documentary filmmaking, “Earth”, cost $47 million and took years of hard work to complete. The film opened last Thursday in Athens, in a triple world premiere along with France and Switzerland.

Behind this giant of a film is a Greek, producer Sophocles Tasioulis, who helped convince the BBC to make the leap to the big screen from the safety of television. Having lived in Germany for the past 25 years, Tasioulis became involved in the movie production business in an unusual manner, he told the press last week, when he came to Greece for the Premiere Nights Athens International Film Festival.

“I studied building aircraft,” he said, “but I had a passion for photography and at one point decided that I wanted to live by creating images. I began working as a camera assistant with a crew in Berlin and then some friends put together a small company of freelance crew members. The business went well so we decided to get into the production business and now I play the mediating role between the money and art. Our first productions were documentaries, and that is where my heart will always lie, but we are also making forays into other genres, such as fiction and animation.”

What is the objective of “Earth”? “Our hope is that the audience, when they come out of the theater, will have fallen in love with our planet once more by seeing the story of the dangers faced by three species: the polar bear, the elephant and the whale. With a subject such as that of the Earth, we wanted to create a global cinematic phenomenon with the simultaneous release of the film in as many countries as possible. Unfortunately, though, this is something that can only be done with big-budget productions like Hollywood blockbusters,” says Tasioulis.

How did a small production company such as Tasioulis’s decide to take on such an expensive project and how did it convince a giant like the BBC? “With the success of ‘Microcosmos’ and ‘Le peuple migrateur’ we observed that there is an audience interested in natural history in cinema. The BBC had some trouble understanding this at first, because UK television shows the best documentaries in the world every day. So, you see, they couldn’t believe that someone would go all the way to the theater and pay for a ticket to watch a documentary. We did some research into what kinds of subjects would make someone take that trip to the movies. There are many social issues of interest, such as unemployment, but they are restricted to a very small audience. If you want to make a big production, you have to think of a big audience. The only answer was to make a documentary on natural history with the biggest producer of this genre in the world, the BBC. We approached them and proposed the project. At first they looked at us as if were crazy and told us that they had been making documentaries exclusively for television for the past 50 years. It took us two years to convince them, but we finally succeeded and made a deal for five movies.”

The rising interest in documentaries shown at the movie theater, according to Tasioulis, is due to the fact that there is a new audience that is interested and a new generation of directors who “know that cinema is the realm of emotions and not information. So, they have learned how to make a documentary for the big screen.”

Related links >
http://www.greenlightmedia.com/cms/front_content.php

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/planetearth/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/planetearth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(TV_series)

V+O Communication said yesterday it had agreed to be taken over by London-based International Marketing & Sales Group Plc, which aims to expand in business and marketing communication in Southeast Europe.

The full acquisition, to be completed over four years, will cost 10.75 million euros.

This year the Eleni Vlachou Greek-German Prize for Journalism goes to Costas Argyros, formerly Greek daily Kathimerini’s correspondent in Vienna.

Former Greek Parliament Speaker Anna Benaki-Psarouda will present the award in the presence of members of the award jury. Last year the award went to daily Kathimerini’s diplomatic correspondent Costas Iordanidis. The award ceremony at the Athens Foreign Press Association on Tuesday will be followed by a small reception.

Arguments over Greece’s Archbishop Christodoulos

Bishops who attended the meeting of the Church of Greece’s Holy Synod yesterday began discussing the possibility of electing a successor to Archbishop Christodoulos, as doctors debated whether he had received the most suitable treatment for his liver cancer.

The Βishop of Zakynthos, Chrysostomos, was the first member of the Holy Synod to publicly suggest that the Church of Greece needs to begin discussion of who will replace the Αrchbishop. «It is absolutely natural for the discussion about a successor to begin since the Αrchbishop is suffering from an incurable disease,» said Chrysostomos.

Archbishop Christodoulos’s liver transplant in the USA was aborted on Monday after it was found that his cancer has spread to his stomach. The 68-year-old Αrchbishop will now undergo a different treatment.

«We will wait for the developments, which have been rapid,» said Chrysostomos. «When you have a situation like this, you cannot wait until the last minute to prepare.» Some Βishops objected to this discussion. The Βishop of Lemnos, Ierotheos, described the talk as being «unseemly, untimely and unethical.»

His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomaios, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, also issued a statement saying that it was «not right» to discuss the Archbishop’s successor while he is still alive.

There were also arguments between doctors on TV shows yesterday about whether the decision to line the Archbishop up for a liver transplant rather than have him undergo some form of chemotherapy was the correct one.

The Athens Medical Association (ISA) urged its members to «exercise restraint» and follow the medical code of ethics when making statements about the Archbishop. «Everyone is free to present their views at scientific conferences or forums, not on television,» said ISA President Sotiris Rigakis. The Association of Hospital Doctors of Athens and Piraeus (EINAP) issued a statement saying that this type of behavior from doctors risked shaking people’s confidence in the medical profession.

Private television channels have sunk to new depths of vulgarity. After the television trials, it’s now the turn of live medical councils. Ever since the bad news emerged about Archbishop Christodouols’s operation, all the commercial networks, with only one exception, have staged a horror show, posing extremely important questions to media-savvy doctors.

But what can be said of a diagnosis that is made thousands of kilometers away? And how reliable can certain doctors be when they are exercising their profession in front of the television cameras? It’s not the news bulletins that are being discredited over the past few days. That’s old news. The casualty this time is medical science itself. Unfortunately, this media stance has been castigated only by the Union of Athens-Piraeus Hospital Doctors (EINAP), while the Athens Medical Association failed to condemn the incident. Human pain is once again subject to exploitation as a means to boost TV ratings. Sure, there is no ban on being inhuman but it’s time people showed some resistance. Those who have some respect for the country and their fellow citizens ought to reach for their remote controls.