Speaker Lineup Announced for MIPTV’s Green Day

CANNES, February 22: David
de Rothschild, Kevin Wall and Yann Arthus-Bertrand have been tapped to
participate in a series of eco-friendly debates and events during Green Day on
April 7 at the 45th MIPTV featuring MILIA.

De Rothschild, a British
adventurer and environmentalist, will deliver a MIPTV keynote in which he will
present the multimedia project “Nick’s Big Green Thing,” a collaboration with
Nickelodeon UK. Launched this month, “Nick’s Big Green Thing,” is a series of
ecological programs aimed at a younger audience. De Rothschild is the author of
The Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate
Change—Or Live Through It
and the founder of Adventure Ecology, a socially-conscious media and
entertainment company that uses adventure to create stories to captivate and
inspire tomorrow’s environmental thinkers and doers.

Meanwhile, Kevin Wall, the
founder and CEO of Live Earth and Control Room, a producer and distributor of
live music entertainment, will give a keynote detailing the media architecture
that enabled more than 2 billion people around the world to experience the Live
Earth concerts. Held on July 7, 2007, Live Earth brought together 150 of the
world’s leading music artists on nine stages across seven continents, delivering
a solutions-based message to solve the climate crisis.

Within the framework of a
debate entitled: “TV Production: How to Make it Green?,” the French
photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the producer of the documentary series Vu
du Ciel (Earth from Above), will articulate the need to produce television
programming in a more environmentally-friendly and less polluting manner, and
discuss the possible solutions to this problem.

On April 7, Japanese
pubcaster NHK will receive a Green World Award. This prize is a tribute to the
channel’s continuing commitment to raising public awareness of environmental
issues over the last 50 years.

“MIPTV’s green conferences
underpin Reed MIDEM’s ‘Going Green’ strategy of promoting environmental
awareness and sound ecological practice to the entertainment and media
industries,” said Paul Johnson, the director of Reed MIDEM’s television
division. “We continue to use MIPTV as a forum to help companies worldwide
exchange innovative ideas that contribute to sustainable green solutions that
improve the world we live in. We’re obviously delighted that NHK, Nickelodeon
and industry figureheads such as David de Rothschild, Kevin Wall and Yann
Arthus-Bertrand have chosen MIPTV as a platform in order to demonstrate their
commitment to tackling these ecological issues.”

—By Irene Lew