The second screen

Julian Rogers examines the spread of second screen content and what lessons the egaming industry can learn 

The term ‘second screening’ could be deemed a somewhat nebulous way of describing the evolving habits of today’s TV viewer. However, it’s clear that audiences have become less passive couch potatoes fed content through the living room goggle box, and much more involved with shows via programme-related content delivered to their mobile devices.

Nielsen reports that 88% of tablet users are engaging with their devices more than once a month whilst watching TV. Almost half of these users are second screening on a daily basis, which is a tremendous opportunity to build brand recognition and loyalty (and a vehicle for marketers to sell us stuff).

Most documentaries intermittently display a hashtag to encourage audience discussion and feedback on Twitter. Other genres go a step further; with TV dramas serving up companion apps and content, while reality shows and game shows in the UK offer dual screen features such as voting and polls. Perhaps inspired by the episode of sitcom The Royal Family where the sedentary protagonists bet on the value of items on TV’s Antiques Roadshow, the BBC has even produced a play-along native app for antiquities enthusiasts.

But one game show that turned out to have a phenomenally success second screen product is Channel 4’s The Million Pound Drop. Second screen specialists Monterosa built the play-along app and desktop game in just nine weeks prior to the live show’s first airing in 2010. Since then, the iOS and Android app has been downloaded over 2.5 million times, 4.5 million people have played online, while a massive 30% of the audience has tried the game at least once.

Speaking to eGR whilst on a business trip to Ghana, Monterosa CEO Tom McDonnell says: “One of the major factors of its success is that [host] Davina McCall totally buys into it. She doesn’t talk about it like it’s a geeky thing that nerds should do. She says her dad plays it, and her tone and persuasiveness makes people think ‘everyone else is doing it so I’ll do it’.”

A dazzling display 

Despite its success, the Million Pound Drop second-screen offering underwent a few game format tweaks to keep players hooked, McDonnell explains. “What happens if you lose all your money? Is that the end of the game? That would be awful and you would disappear, so we had to create a slightly different one on the TV so that we would keep people with the show.”

He says users tend to play for around 30 minutes (the programme lasts one hour). Performance stats and graphics are also fed back into the show: ‘So far, women are beating men’, for instance. “The boys will become competitive and respond to these taunts,” McDonnell explains.

Another enormous live format to exploit with second screening is sport, which attracts just the kind of male-dominated audience that betting companies target. Of course, in-play betting on a smartphone is already a prime example of a second screening, whether it be watching the match on the lounge TV or big screen down the pub.

“The beauty of betting is that our business, by its very nature, is a second screen experience,” Sky Betting & Gaming’s head of core products, Andy Walton, says. “We augment live sport with price-based opinion, allowing the user to squeeze more excitement out of the game. The technology has now effectively caught up with our product rather than the other way round. Users can now sit comfortably in front of a big HD screen using a touchscreen device to interact with real-time in-play betting. None of these technologies were mass market 10 years ago.”   McDonnell concurs, but chips in with some advice. “In-play betting is real time and it’s engaging, although if I were in the bookmakers’ shoes, I would be looking at the layer of people who probably wouldn’t put any money on today but would get involved in something that’s free. One way is through social and tapping into the people who are distracted watching the match on Twitter, or by using TV spots to advertise to them to play a free game. We haven’t really seen anyone crack that yet.”

Benefits of association

Walton’s SkyBet benefits from close ties to satellite broadcaster Sky and its widespread sports coverage. For instance, the free-play Super 6 scores prediction game (native app and HTML5) attracts some 650,000 players every Saturday chasing a top prize of £250,000. As well as users second screening Sky’s Soccer Saturday programme to follow their progress, the game includes calls to action indicating that an accumulator with these predictions would yield X amount with SkyBet. Walton adds: “We’ve managed to successfully tie together three key Sky services – broadcast, free apps and betting – into a seamless experience that’s proving very popular.”

One other company tapping into the mindset of certain football fans and shrewd bettors’ sponge-like appetite for team and player news, detailed stats and match analysis is Squawka. With this free desktop and iOS product (half of users are mobile), fans are able to dissect matches on their second screens for a detailed analytical overview of a cornucopia of facts and figures.

“There are very few sports fans out there that, given the right level of access, do not want to know more about the game they are watching,” Squawka CEO Sanjit Atwal says. “We have directly seen this demand grow from fans over the last 12 months in that in January, 2013, we had around 400,000 users across our platform – this exploded to over two million this January.” This is sure to soar even further with the World Cup in the summer – a sure-fire betting bonanza for the bookmakers.

Under starter’s orders

Another pretty much guaranteed annual cash cow for betting firms is horseracing’s Grand National, attracting £300m in bets – much of these wagers from once-a-year racing punters. But with 40 marauding horses negotiating 4.5 miles of track and 30 obstacles, the spectacle invariably descends into a dizzying blur of horse flesh, jockeys’ silks and strewn fences, making it notoriously tricky for armchair bettors to identify their selections. So ahead of last year’s race, broadcaster Channel 4 sought to create a mobile and desktop companion product to track the horses’ positions in real time.

“The idea originally came from the question ‘where’s my horse’?” reveals James Rutherford, multiplatform commissioning editor for sport at Channel 4. “It’s true to some extent in every race when working out which silk colour is your fancy, but when it comes to the Grand National the problem is magnified enormously. With the length of the race the field can also get very stretched out – with the broadcast focusing on the leaders you can often not see your pick for large parts of the coverage. Combining that with the audience for this race in particular – people who take part in sweepstakes or place their only bet for the year on a horse – there seemed to be a real opportunity.”

The solution: the groundbreaking Horse Tracker. Synced with the user’s TV using audio watermarking, the native iOS app and HTML5 product provided the viewer with data on each runner, their chosen horse’s position, speed and acceleration, distance to the winning post, distance to the leader and fences left to jump. The steeplechase, the first time it had been screened live on Channel 4, drew almost nine million viewers, while 100,000 people used Horse Tracker concurrently. At one point the app – also developed by Monterosa – was sitting pretty atop of the ‘free’ chart in Apple’s App Store.

Users did report some niggles, but on the whole the ambitious product stood up to the test. “I think we succeeded in the complex technical challenge of delivering data from 40 horses in real time to the audience,” says Rutherford. The feedback from users, especially on Twitter, was generally positive.  “The audience response was fantastic – some really great comments across social media – not to say that something this complex worked perfectly for everyone – but certainly a lot of people really loved it.”

Made for sport

As well as Horse Tracker, there is an array of other sport-related second screen products for consumers to get their mitts on. Yet the fact of the matter is that sport is inherently unpredictable and often fast paced. Not all fans want to be distracted by a second screen when engrossed in a thrilling horse race or a nail-biting football match. To succeed, it needs to be intuitive and serve a purpose. “You need to make your component and an extension of that experience, not a distraction or a side channel,” McDonnell opines. Rutherford, who believes there is still “some way to go” with second screening live sport, says: “I’ll often watch sports coverage and see a great piece of analysis by a pundit using data from the sport. But if we can unveil the data to the audience they can choose what stats they are focusing on and when to look at them then suddenly they are the ones analysing and seeing patterns in the game rather than waiting to be told by the expert at a break in play.”

Outside the sphere of sport, other gambling products are served up as a second screen experience. For starters, Sky Poker has its own dedicated channel on Sky TV that enables online players to have their play critiqued live on air (the footage is delayed to protect the integrity of the games). Similarly, terrestrial channels ITV and Channel 5 both screen live casino gaming for nocturnal punters and insomniac viewers in the wee hours each morning (OFCOM restricts the programming to between midnight and 4am).

Charles Butler, CEO of Netplay TV, the umbrella company for bTV and online casinos Jacktop247 and SuperCasino, says the opportunity to play along with a live dealer and roulette wheel is the USP. “These days it’s all about creating engaging content for the consumer and audiences like the participation and interaction element – rather than just sitting on your computer playing in a standalone environment. They like the interaction and the fact that they might get a mention or see their name on screen.”

Capturing the shift

Around 40% of Netplay TV’s new sign-ups are mobile players. But the TV shows not only reinforce the trust element; it’s are also an especially useful customer acquisition and retention tool. In fact, 40% of Netplay TV’s revenue last year came from players who had an account for more than 12 months. “Because we are the only people who offer this product, we have very ‘sticky’ customers, high customer loyalty and high player value.”

Butler highlights how second screening partly redresses the shift in viewing habits from live TV to catch-up TV. “One way to ensure people are watching live TV more is to create a second-screen app. It creates engaging content, it’s more interesting for the customer, and viewers stay longer. It brings the customer to live TV, which is where the companies sell their ad spot, and will be used more and more by the TV companies because the dual screen experience gives you another medium to target those customers with marketing.”

For most programmes, though, second screen native and web-based apps would be a superfluous offering and a waste of time and resources. And not all those that try get it right, often haphazardly bolting on a second screen option just because it’s in vogue. McDonnell illustrates the point: “Oh, I’ve heard that 80% of people use a device when watching a TV show so I’m going to slap on some chat, aggregated tweets and a poll every five minutes. This is always going to be a bit disappointing because it’s got nothing to do with the TV show.”

Nevertheless, there’s little doubt second screening is set to continue to grow due so many viewers having handheld devices within arm’s reach, although some media experts say the second screen has now become the primary screen. “The propensity to get involved with you stuff you like hasn’t changed,” McDonnell remarks. “People enjoy being part of the thing they are absorbed in – that’s the trend that’s driving the second screen. It’s super fan involvement.”