Modern mobile phone technology has given movie buffs more information about when new films will be coming out and more ways to order tickets. But in September of last year, one film festival figured out how to use mobile phones to acquire data and entice audience members, by letting viewers answer trivia questions and vote on films with their personal devices.
According to a press release from application development firm Kaazing, the company teamed up with the Palo Alto International Film Festival (PAIFF) to launch the app Instant Film Feedback. With the app, PAIFF audience members were able to “vote for their favorite movie, track voting results, and participate in trivia challenges – all in real time.”
The Instant Film Feedback application was created on the company’s new data communication platform, the WebSocket Gateway 3.5.
As Kaazing executive vice president John Donnelly explained in the release, “The film festival was a good fit to launch the product and leverage what they wanted to do in terms of providing a great mobile experience for film-goers.”
Trivia questions were projected on the screens themselves, and audience members were able to take quizzes and rate the films they had seen. In all, about 2,000 people participated in the trivia challenges and more than 1,000 voted on their favorite film.
As film festivals continue to pop up, more are realizing that new innovations, such as mobile phone technology to keep viewers involved, are necessary. As we saw this week, the Beloit International Film Festival has begun using outdoor movie screens to attract viewers, a tactic other film festivals may begin to adopt. Outdoor screens can help accommodate large volumes of audience members and provide film festivals with more viewing options.