The Brief

The iconic TV quiz show På Spåret wanted us to create a digital concept that could engage the three million viewers who quiz along every week.

Insight

The show had been going for decades and family members and friends had viewed it together in their couches, competing, since the start. We realized that one of the most engaging game shows in Sweden was trapped in the couch of each living room. And a couch is fairly small.

Strategy

To create an expanded gaming universe for the viewers and enhance the experience, give them more and better opponents and to awake a feeling of being part of a movement - not merely viewers of a TV-show.

The idea

A second screen gaming environment, simple, intuitive, in real-time and platform independent - because of the diversified viewer base.

Launch and implementation

We let viewers unite by challenging each other in a real-time second-screen game, synced with the show during air-time – enabling them to become one with the show. The only thing needed: a smartphone, computer, laptop, or an iPad. Of course the results were easy to share on social media, such as Facebook or Twitter.

Technical solution

In order to create a low threshold for the (rather mature) audience we chose to focus on a completely web-based platform. UI wise we used fully responsible design with graceful downgrade to earlier JS if we detected older clients. To increase the user experience (and minimize the risk of cheating) we synchronized all clients at particular events during the show and sent all answers at once from the clients to the API to check the results. We also matched this result with the others of your Facebook friends (with the same FB-app installed) and returned the friends - and the user's - result to each client. In order to handle the DDOS-like traffic we used three fronts serverside with variable capacity from AWS if/when that would be necessary. 

Result

A lot of Swedish media, as well as international tech blogs, covered the initiative and the fans of the show applauded it, sharing their results and spreading the word online. After just a couple of shows, tens of thousands viewers had tested their skills through our web application.

We placed the couch online. Let the games begin!