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Mobile & Wireless
It’s show time for real-time
SinglePoint and GoldenGate add urgency to prime time TV
by Jim Barthold
True mobile interactivity takes on a new urgency when it’s
connected to prime time television programming. The
company charged with delivering the SMS information as part
of interactive TV programs must be on its toes to meet for-
real real-time demand for statistics and data.
“It’s been an interesting change for us, migrating to the TV
space,” said Curt Miller, CTO of SinglePoint, which previously
developed daily reports on carrier-based interactivity based
on stored data from a day’s activities. Day-old information,
while it might be valuable for tracking carrier trends, is less
attractive than stale donuts for a TV show that needs to know
what consumers are doing and why they are, or are not,
interacting so they can use up-to-the minute information to
plot out the upcoming show.
“The reports for carrier-based interactivity were really easy to
do; you grind them out in the middle of the night and
everybody looks at them the next day,” said Miller. “You go
into the TV world and they decide at four in the afternoon that
they’re going to change what they do on the eight o’clock show …
and they want to see the effects of their change.”
TV producers also want to track how many people are
interacting with their shows while the shows are happening. To
provide that information, SinglePoint needed to go outside its
area of expertise and deploy a real-time data integration
system from GoldenGate Software.
“The show’s over when we do our updates so it wasn’t well
designed for being dynamic,” Miller said. “We use GoldenGate
to take our nightly processing of our data warehouse to real
time. Now about a minute after the message goes through
the system and is delivered to the handset you can actually
go into the warehouse and see the results.”
That gives show producers enough time to shift gears and
send their programs in new directions aimed at increasing
audience participation.
“The producers would look at the traffic flow … messages-per-
second coming in, and if they decided it was low they’d have
the guy on-screen literally say, ‘I’m feeling generous; let’s
change the reward for getting this answer right from $250 to
$500.’ Thirty seconds later you’d see a spike in the traffic
coming in,” he said.
There will eventually be plenty of more uses for that
information once it’s compiled and stored, said Sami Akbay,
vice president of product management and marketing for
GoldenGate. Among other things, it will provide the data for
sharp guesstimates about viewership, augmenting or perhaps
even replacing the current ratings system.
“Over time people will accumulate enough historic information
that you can look at the trends and make rather accurate
guesses,” he said. “Probably three, four, five years down the
road the number of SMS messages (compared) to viewers
that Nielsen reports are going to be pretty accurately tied to
each other.”
That is, of course, still a half-decade or so away. Right now
the TV industry is just learning how to deal with the
information that’s available from interactive communications;
carriers are learning how to deal with the immediacy of TV’s
demands; and SinglePoint is learning how to deal with the
prime time traffic while maintaining a steady back-and-forth
flow.
“You start running all these great real-time reports in the
same system that’s doing the messaging and those reports
take overhead and slow things down,” said Miller. “We use
GoldenGate to replicate all the production data into a single
database server that’s out of the message flow.”
The TV model, not SMS and not just mobile, is changing, said
Akbay.
“Think about how you watch TV now versus how you watched
T1 10 years ago. There’s TiVo, a lot of different things (and)
that change is making it a lot more important to augment
traditional media with new coming media and make it more
interactive. It may be Internet, SMS or wireless or other
devices to come,” he said.
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