The Future of Content Viewing Means More Ways to Engage
By Gavin Douglas
The ways we experience TV and video are quickly changing. Today’s viewers aren’t satisfied by just sitting back and watching their favorite shows. They want to be involved, and blockchain is increasingly being looked to as a way to reward and incentivize that engagement
A study by Accenture of viewers watching broadcast TV, revealed that 87% watch with a 2nd screen (mobile device). Our current culture of entertainment is a multi-tasking, detail-seeking, fact-checking, high-speed game of thrill-seeking viewers raising the stakes ever higher for entertainment providers and brand marketers seeking a slice of their divided attention.
Today’s viewers enjoy being part of polls, deciding outcomes of shows, sharing favorites with other viewers and engaging in other more direct ways with their viewed entertainment. With these kinds of habits, desires and demands, how can brands and content providers (TV shows, online channels, and networks) engage the modern viewer and effectively hold his or her attention?
The benefits of enhanced engagement is easy to see for TV shows and digital content providers too. The more engaged and involved viewers are, the easier it is for content providers to gain lucrative sponsorship from brands.
A great example of a show iPowow worked with to improve audience engagement was “Modern Family” on the USA Network, sponsored by Target. Viewers had the opportunity of going to ModernFamilyLive.com while the show was airing and to participate live on their 2nd screens. Viewers were given fun options like choosing whose side they were on when dilemas came up between characters, guessing the outcome of a situation, or voicing their own opinions on a plot quandary. As soon as viewers picked an option, they could see what percentage of others agreed with their decision. As viewers played along with the show, they could also see which top 5 viewers racked up the most points by being right on their guesses for outcomes. This made for a satisfying, real-time, community-based experience, beyond just watching the show. Modern Family fans could let their love of the show be known to other fans and flaunt their knowledge of the characters by engaging and competing as the show aired.
Another example of enhanced viewing experience used Facebook Live to interact with a Top 30 News anchor as she shared news bits from different years occuring on that day. Emoticons floated across the screens of smartphones as reactions were shared in real time by viewers. The news anchor was able to share the results of a poll about a controversial current event topic and comment on the percentages on both sides of the issue. In this way, individuals were able to directly contribute to the entire viewing experience by providing feedback that was incorporated by the news anchor.
The HIT Protocol, an iPowow initiative, takes this audience participation to the next level by incentivizing even more and deeper engagement. The system accomplishes this by offering additional rewards to viewers for their participation. Rewards are distributed to viewers in HIT tokens which can then be redeemed for valuable goods and services in the Digital Shopping Plaza. By use of smart contracts and the tokenization enabled by blockchain technology, the HIT Protocol dramatically upgrades the way viewers engage with shows and brands. Viewers will look forward to seeing their favorite shows so they can have the opportunity to earn HITs.
Rewarding TV and video viewers with HIT tokens adds one more important facet to the dazzling jewel of engagement for consumers. A facet with the potential to outshine all others.
