Strictly Come Dancing, The BBC’s entertainment blockbuster, took a big step into the social TV space in 2009 with its ‘Strictly Social’ play-along application.
During the Saturday night TV shows, viewers could log onto the Strictly Social website and join a Social TV party with other fans of the show. The Strictly Social experience included live commenting, quick-fire votes, emotes in the form of “Boo-Wow-Gasp” reactions, and a play-along prediction game, in which players predicted the judges’ scores. Viewers accumulated loyalty points throughout the series which determined the quality of their “paddle”, starting with “paper” and working up to “platinum”.
Although this commission was focussed on Strictly, Monterosa proposed to the BBC that many of the components required could be re-used for other social viewing services, and the concept of “Showtime” was born. Showtime is a general-purpose system for managing social viewing events. The Showtime admin console is flexible and user-friendly, and throughout the series it was used by the BBC team to test and run shows, without the need for support from Monterosa.
Technically the project consists of a Flash front-end application, designed and built by digital agency Pancentric, and a combination of BBC Forge and Monterosa Enmasse on the back-end. The Showtime admin console is a BBC Forge PAL application, which drives the Forge back-end services (Identity, Live, DNA) and pushes content to Monterosa Enmasse, which provides high-volume, instant client communication.
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