BT launches worldwide TV voting via Facebook

BT Agilemedia has announced the integration of its Online Participation Media platform (OPM) with Facebook, to offer real-time online voting and interaction, on a mass scale, to audiences of TV entertainment shows in the UK and around the world. The integration enables users to interact via a show’s Facebook page and vote for their favourite contestants etc using Facebook Credits, increasing their involvement with, and loyalty to, a show and its content.

Facebook is increasingly being used by people to communicate with friends about these popular entertainment programmes and so provides a valuable resource to help programme makers target their audiences more closely.

Recent research shows that already huge numbers of fans are using Facebook to interact with live TV shows. For example, in May 2011 the American Idol Facebook page had more than 5.7million ‘people like this’ registrations, and the XFactor page more than 2.6million.

BT Agilemedia’s integration with Facebook now means people can cast votes directly from the show’s Facebook page and provide them with extra content at the same time as they watch the live shows, increasing the potential for larger numbers of votes and interactions.

Using the OPM platform, broadcasters can run voting events, competitions and play along games from their Facebook page and from their website – which is accessible from any internet-connected device. The platform also enables Service Providers to manage the service for broadcasters, such as providing analysis of events performance or dealing with customer queries.

BT Agilemedia already provides the technology which handles telephone voting for all the major programmes in the UK including The XFactor and Britain’s Got Talent – and is now is adding an on-line voting facility.

It has considerable experience and expertise in dealing with the mass volumes of votes generated by these popular entertainment programmes. Its Recorded Information Distributed Equipment (RIDE) platform, used by all the major UK broadcasters, is capable of delivering in excess of 240,000 telephone votes per minute, and can maintain that level throughout the duration of a show’s voting window.

BT’s Vote Aggregator technology can be used to count all votes – whatever communications provider or method is used to cast votes be it telephone, red button, mobile and postal votes. Its Winner Selector facility enables programme makers to select competition winners fairly ensuring and demonstrating compliance.

A dedicated 24/7 operational team ensures its service availability levels are 99.99% which is why so many major customers choose to work with BT Agilemedia.

Jeremy Hallsworth, BT Agilemedia’s CEO, said “In the live TV voting environment, viewers and broadcasters expect absolute reliability and a service they can trust to receive record and publish accurate results in very quick time. Our experience of delivering this, in an auditable and compliant manner, at very high volumes, puts us in an excellent position to meet these expectations.

“Integrating our OPM platform with Facebook will enable us to ensure that consumers have much richer experience” continues Jeremy. “We are bringing together the social creativity of Facebook with the scale and reliability of our voting platform.”

BT Agilemedia’s services are not limited to entertainment programmes. It also enables organisations to take credit card payments or charity donations by phone and its WAVE IVR platform provides compliance to the rigorous Payment Card Industry standards brought in by the major credit card companies to help minimise theft and fraud.

Its state of the art mobile application platform provides premium rate mobile services enabling customers to self provide, publish and promote quizzes, voting, alerts, subscription services and content management via SMS texts and multi-media messaging. And BT Agilemedia can respond extremely quickly, setting up major appeals within a few hours – for example, the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for the Haiti earthquake victims took six hours to set-up and took over £3.5m in donations in the first week.