ATLANTA – Interactive gaming over cable systems appears to be gaining some serious traction.
At the National Cable Telecommunications Association’s National Show, the organization has hired local college students to populate a gaming area where they will play with the latest gaming features offered by exhibiting companies – some of whom are seeing usage numbers spike up as more consumers get used to digital and what it can offer.
Buzztime, one of the leaders in such games (it might be best known as the former NTN bar games company and the parent company is still NTN Buzztime, with an office in Montreal), has moved beyond single player games and trivia. Bell ExpressVu offers some of Buzztime’s basic games with its receivers in Canada.
However, in February, the company launched its first multi-player games (multi-table Texas Hold’em and 9-ball pool) with Pennsylvania MSO Blue Ridge Communications. In its first two months since launch – and without any marketing at all, 20% of Blue Ridge’s 30,000 digital customers played the Buzztime games.
Over three million minutes and over 200,000 iTV games were played within the first 60 days.
The households that played Buzztime grew from 4.5 hours of game play in February to six hours in March for an average of 19 game sessions and 27 game sessions per household per month respectively. For March, Buzztime Billiards players were engaged for an average of 17 minutes per game and Texas Hold’em players averaged 12 minutes per game, demonstrating the "stickiness" of Buzztime’s multiplayer iTV games.
The games are play-for-fun and the multi-player games can’t be done via satellite.
"I think we have come close to the right mix of massively multiplayer trivia game shows, multiplayer games like Hold’em and Billiards and our suite of single-player games to get the cable households clicking the remote and staying engaged," said Ty Lam, president of Buzztime Entertainment, a subsidiary of NTN Buzztime, Inc. "With over three years of cable deployment under our belt, we are learning how to build loyal ‘couch gamer’ communities and build value that can’t be duplicated on satellite."
During today’s (Sunday’s) press conference, Lam acknowledged the advertising capabilities of the platform, where regular spots could be played while moving from game screen to game screen, or product logos or products themselves could sit on the card table, for example. He said it would be up to the cable operator whether or not to sell the ads on their own or share national sales completed by Buzztime.
For example, in some of its systems, one of the trivia channels is sponsored by The History Channel.
– Greg O’Brien
