Ventuz Supports TV Debate for Spanish Elections

In December, the Spanish people went into what proved to be a subversive election period. With a lot of controversy and varying visions for the country, the opposing candidates made an effort to communicate their agendas to the public in every way possible. One of them was a TV debate between the then acting prime minister Mariano Rajoy and his contender Pedro Sánchez of the party PSOE. The debate took place on December 14th and was equipped with a Ventuz installation.

To make sure that all candidates are treated equally, TV debates follow very strict rules in terms of speaking time. The agency MSL made sure that everyone was aware at every moment of how much time each speaker had left. This was provided by a Ventuz powered application that was shown on three screens: at the edge of the stage in perfect viewing distance each candidate had their individual screen that counted down their speaking time. A third screen was reserved for the moderator and showed the numbers for both candidates simultaneously. The clocks were triggered from the control room.

Ventuz was also used for on-air graphics which consisted of the candidates and moderator presentations, entrance titles and exit roll.

The debate was watched by over 11 million Spanish viewers, almost half of the entire TV audience, via the stations TVE-1, Antena 3, La Sexta, 13 TV, Telemadrid, Canal Sur and Aragón TV. At the same time, the program was streamed online to an additional 260,000 people worldwide. Journalists from CCTV (China), ARD (Germany), NTN24 and RCN TV (Colombia), Associated Press, Reuters, France Presse (France) and Notimex (Mexico) were reporting from the press areas.