Mass participation services

Abstract

To television broadcasters good viewing figures are essential in justifying a programme's place in the schedules and, for commercial broadcasters, key to securing the all-important advertising revenue. As a result programme makers are constantly looking for new ways to engage and hold their audience, and allow them to participate in programme formats, particularly as part of live TV shows. One well established way of achieving this is to allow the audience to take part in a televote. Participants are attracted by the sense of direct involvement and influence that televotes provide, and because of this a televote can dramatically increase audience figures. To the operators of a public telephone network, however, these events represent concentrated, abnormal traffic patterns that have the potential to seriously degrade the quality and availability of the network for other applications, consequently specialised network technology needs to be deployed to make these events both manageable and profitable.