Thomas Aigner


Thomas "Thomy" Aigner is a former Austrian TV-Entertainer and a current documentary film producer and lecturer.

Radio and television

He began his career as a journalist in 1983 at ORF in Vienna, and then hosted radio-shows at Ö3.
In 1986 he debuted on public TV-channel FS1 with the first interactive TV-game show Superflip.
In 1998, he established a correspondent's office in Los Angeles. He provided ORF with radio and TV features for the series Jolly Joker,

Seitenblicke and Look as well as German radio stations such as Bayern 3. For RTL Radio Luxemburg he produced 54 episodes
of the weekly radio program Hollywood Hautnah.
During his study of "Broadcast Management" at UCLA, he worked as a trainee for KIIS-FM and the show Rick Dees in the morning.

Projects

In 1996, he produced the first Internet TV show on German TV, netNite, for ZDF. Starting 1998 he developed and produced the tri-medial show netRadio for Bayern3 radio station of the ARD/Bayerischer Rundfunk.
Therefore, he developed an early Second-Screen application named URLPush.
Along with the Radio and TV shows, Aigner published the netNewsletter. The newsletter served 23.000 subscribers.
This netNewsletter - and the lack of a Double opt-in feature in 1996 – led to the first decision relevant to unsolicited commercial email from the federal supreme court of Germany BGH. A subscriber had mistyped his email address.
Meanwhile, the ruling has been defined even more precisely: "A newsletter that is the result of an editorial activity has both freedom of broadcasting and of expression, even if it contains advertisements".
At the turn of millennium, he co-created the art project Screenhouse, with artist Markus Heinsdorff, where websites were projected onto a
exterior surface of the HypoVereinsbank headquarters in Munich.
In the year 2000, Endemol contracted Aigner's agency for the multimedia implementation of the first Big Brother TV sequel in Germany.
In the year 2001, Aigner obtained a part-licence for the radio frequency 92.4 MHz and began broadcasting on FAZ Businessradio with the daily program net.fm, focussed on new media.
Recently, Aigner has been predominantly working on the TV-documentary series PilotsEYE.tv. The actual 13 sequels show the fascination of flying through the eyes of the pilots. The viewer can enjoy the flight from the jump-seat's perspective by means six synchronized cameras in high definition. The program is broadcast in many countries, and sold on DVD and Blu-ray.

Teaching

Since 2005 he is actively engaged as director of studies for the degree course business administrator marketing BAW at the Bayerische Akademie
für Werbung und Marketing.
Since 2011 he has been lecturing at the BAF.

Awards

In 1985 Thomas Aigner was awarded the most popular radio presenter in Austria by readers of the teenage magazine "MusicMan".
In the year 2000, Thomas Aigner was included in the 100 most important Germans on the Internet list by the industry newswire service KressReport.
In the year 2000 he was awarded for the idea of the netRadio show on Bayern3 with the OnlineStar.
For the Northpole episode of PilotsEYE.tv, Aigner received a silver intermedia-globe at the World Media Festival in Hamburg in 2009.

Publications and further reading

In 2001 he served as co-author for the book Streaming Media – Internet bewegter, bunter, lauter.