International. One of the biggest challenges for televisions today is to get the participation of viewers. Building a bridge between the TV studio and the families in their homes is one of the greatest aspirations of television, and producers, creators and audiovisual managers continue to look for innovative solutions to achieve this.
German public television ZDF has been considering this idea for years, an interactive contest for children, in which they can play each other from their homes, moderated by a presenter in the studio. Several pilot programs were made for KiKA, ZDF's channel focused on children.
Most consisted of varied questions and challenges, such as picking up all the objects a boy could find around his house at a certain time. Although advanced systems were used, all programs ran into the same problem, too much delay in video signals.
All this caused the communication between the participants and the study to be very rigid and complex, which not only hindered the participation of the contestants, but also affected the overall rhythm of the entire program.
Eventually, the project eventually landed in the hands of the Munich-based agency Rayd. "When they called us, the ZDF had already decided to give a more complex approach to the program," explained Oliver Grimm of Rayd. "They wanted to incorporate video games so that children could play from their screens against a celebrity on the set. But they still had the problem of delay, which meant a double challenge for us."
Rayd, due to his great experience in broadcast technology and in the development of contests, completely changed the workflow, starting from scratch. "We started with the video communication system," says Johaness Klaer de Rayd, "he quickly tells us that none of the usual systems could be valid for this project."
They created a Flash-based plugin for Internet browsers so that kids could access it by simply opening a specific page on the Internet, without having to install any additional software on their computers. This reduced the delay of the 6 incoming video sources, four contestants and two alternates, to less than half a second.
Another great challenge was the creation of the games, Rayd created a wide variety of them, from adaptations of classics such as Pong, to flight or racing simulators.
Contestants participated using their webcams and a motion sensor based on a shader developed for the show, which tracked the contestants' movements and moved them into the game environment. On the screens of their homes the children could see the game superimposed on their own video signals. For the show's second season, Rayd added voice commands to the games to make them even more interesting.
With three data sources for each contestant, video, audio, and motion sensor data, the contest server really had a lot of work to do. In addition to handling the logic of the contest, the software had to calculate all the scores and rankings, and transmit that information to the control system, another development of Rayd's own.
The ultimate goal was to gather all that information – video signals from the contestants, real-time game signals, scores and images from the cameras – into an HD signal for broadcast. For this purpose, Rayd used three systems with Ventuz real-time graphics software. In total, three servers were installed, each controlling a specific aspect of the program. One machine was equipped with a Deltacast HD video capture card, which allowed two HD video inputs, one with real-time game rendering, while the other received the six video signals from the contestants and the celebrity on set, all of them in a multiple signal. "We created a masking function in Ventuz, to control which areas of the split screen appeared in certain positions in the broadcast," Oliver explained. "This allowed us to place the contestants' video signals exactly where we needed them."
A second Ventuz system was used to generate the on-air graphics in real time. Rayd created a large number of graphic frames in Ventuz Designer, each of them according to the aspect of the game in which the graphics would be placed. Then the video signals of all the participants were distributed throughout the game area, and their names and additional information were added as another layer of additional text. The Ventuz scene received such information from the control software using a .NET-based protocol.
Between games, Ventuz's system also handled the graphics with the ratings, "the first leaderboard to include real-time videos of contestants in television history," Johannes says. A third machine with Ventuz was used to generate the content of the videowall on the set, an HD rear projection that presented all the information to the viewers in the studio and showed the scores and classifications, as well as full-screen and real-time videos of the children in their homes
Ventuz has been Rayd's real-time chart reference system for many years. "There's no software on the market that can compete with Ventuz," Oliver said, "and of course the price is a huge advantage, but what really makes the difference is what you can offer clients as an agency. Ventuz has so many small tools and options that help you design really attractive graphics, including advanced animations, but, at the same time, you can work really fast. So even on a very tight budget, graphics can have the appearance of graphics on high-level professionals."
The two seasons of Web vs. Promi have been a success for the KiKA and ZDF channels, with a screen share of around 17%, a figure that also increased over time. Although the second season ended in 2013, all episodes continue to air regularly, still garnering a notable audience. Web vs. Web Promi was nominated for Emmy Awards for digital programs in 2013. So far, no other production has achieved such a level of interactivity with viewers in their homes.
