April 16, 2007

LiveHive, Global TV team up in reality show

MICHAEL HAMMOND

WATERLOO (Jul 5, 2007)

A Waterloo company's software will make its television debut tonight along with Global TV's season premiere of its reality show Big Brother 8.

LiveHive Systems has developed an online game that allows the show's fans to compete with each other by predicting what will happen in each episode.

The game, based on LiveHive's NanoGaming software platform, will allow Big Brother viewers to compete for weekly prizes, such as large-screen televisions, based on who makes the most correct predictions.

More importantly for LiveHive, the deal with Global marks its first major partnership with a TV network for its online gaming products.

"I think this is a real milestone for us," said Rob Riopelle, LiveHive's vice-president of business development. "This is the point where we can change the way people watch TV."

Riopelle expects to announce another partnership with a television network for LiveHive's NanoGaming baseball game in the coming weeks. The game, which operates at LiveHive's SpeedofSport.com website, was launched at the beginning of the Major League Baseball season.

The Big Brother game can be accessed directly from the Global site, www.globaltv.ca/bigbrother. The show begins its eighth season at 8 p.m.

LiveHive's online games help TV networks attract web users to their websites for long periods of time. Riopelle said TV networks are looking for creative ways to drive more traffic to their sites as a way of creating more advertising revenues.

All of Canada's major networks have begun streaming some of their shows on the Internet as the popularity of websites such as YouTube threaten to drive younger viewers away from conventional TV.

With Big Brother, viewers will be able to use LiveHive's game to predict who will be kicked off the show each week. Viewers can also predict other scenarios such as who will pick a fight with another contestant.

Big Brother began as a social experiment in Europe where a group of strangers were forced to live in a house together while being filmed by dozens of cameras. Each week, a resident in the house is expelled.

The popularity of the show in Europe spawned a North American version, which has become a mainstay of reality television.

mhammond@therecord.com

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