Engaging viewers through social TV games

IPTV platforms have revealed a great potential for the viewers' involvement by allowing the development of services and applications related with the TV content. Taking advantage of both the potentialities of these platforms and game related dynamics new ways to promote interaction between viewers may be achieved. This research focuses on searching and validating innovative forms of entertainment through television. In this context we designed, developed and evaluated the Wize application that combines some social games characteristics with interactive television features. This paper presents the functional specification of this application, implemented in an IPTV platform and describes a Field Trial carried out with 22 users. To accomplish this evaluation those persons were provided at their homes with a sub-set of the Wize features integrated in an iTV application of a popular TV show. The results provide a better understanding of the expectations towards social TV related games and reveal that users have strong motivation to continue to use such an application and a strong interest in doing it with their friends. The results also showed the potential of this type of applications to engage in a deeper manner the viewers with the TV content.