Ventuz Shows What Italy Thinks

Viewer participation is an important topic for broadcasting in the 21st century. Increasingly, networks develop new show formats to make the viewer at home an active part of the TV experience. An effective way to do so is with mobile apps.

This concept was recently put into action by Italian broadcaster Rai1 with the program “Gli italiani hanno sempre ragione”, a game show that explores what Italy thinks on a number of topics. Viewers were invited to download the app onto their mobile devices and select their answer on questions from many different areas. In the studio, competing teams of celebrities then had to guess which answer received the highest percentage.

The Italian agency Clonwerk used Ventuz to visualize the entire game graphics as well as the real-time data from the app. In order to achieve this, a connection to the app database had to be established to stream the data directly into the Ventuz render engine and create the graphics dynamically.

“One of the main reasons for choosing Ventuz was the ability to animate the camera without using a fixed timeline”, explained Michela Di Nardo, Producer at Clonwerk. “This allowed us to connect the camera’s motion to input values coming from the gameplay, so that the 3D graphics environment changed according to what was happening in the show. This was a great advantage for us.”

The show was aired in four episodes over the summer and proved a great success for broadcaster Rai1.