Seven West Media (the Seven Network) has announced it is entering the world of Hybrid broadband TV (HbbTV) with a new channel being produced in partnership with Brand New Media.
The new channel, Healthy ME TV, promises to cover a range of health and lifestyle topics, including exercise and fitness programs, health news, medical insights, nutrition advice and healthy cooking.
Perry Smith, CEO of Brand New Media, said:
“This strategic partnership with Seven West Media combines the best of health and wellness content with the best of technology, bringing Australia, a technology‐savvy and wellbeing‐centric country, a never‐before‐seen transmedia health platform. Australia has a strong consumption of content on connected devices and TV anytime and anywhere is a here and now proposition. This channel provides Australia with a resource to educate, inspire and entertain; a resource to help people lead a healthy lifestyle and manage their health.”
Kurt Burnette, Chief Revenue Officer for Seven West Media:
“We are excited to be marketing partners with Brand New Media to provide Australians with this first of a kind service as our company moves into the growing health sector. The unmatched promotional power of Seven West Media’s portfolio of media assets will bring huge scale to the channel and ensure its success. Healthy ME TV will be one of the first channels to appear on Seven’s Hybrid broadband TV platform (HbbTV) launch early in 2014.”
Details of specific programs have not been made available but given that Brand New Media currently produces the infomercial channel TV4ME for Seven and its regional partner Prime7, and that Seven’s spokesperson for the venture is the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, indicates that Healthy ME TV may possibly be a sales-driven format — lots of “branded content” or infomercials interspersed with low-rent lifestyle or niche market programming.
HbbTV is the international industry standard being adopted for providing television content, such as video on demand, to internet-connected devices.
Seven is the first Australian network to have committed to launching an HbbTV product.
