(Los Angeles, May 17, 2013) By popular vote, South Carolina's charismatic soul singer, Candace Glover, was announced as the 2013 American Idol in front of 7,000 fans in the theater and millions more watching on remote screens. While the singers were belting it out all season, Telescope was holding the reigns in the texting wars, herding hundreds of millions of votes from all across America via their HTML 5 pipeline, until the moment when founder Edward Boddington walked on stage to announce to the world, "I'm delighted once again to confirm that Telescope has counted and verified the vote for this 12th season of American Idol and the result is in this envelope!"
The company has processed over 1.5 billion interactions in the last year and says that 75% of those are coming from mobile devices. I was curious about how this all works behind the scenes. In this exclusive interview with Jason George, CEO of Telescope, conducted at NAB this year, he talks about how the company manages billions of texts for their clients, including the ever-popular, American Idol.
Audio Interview and transcript here.
Jason said, "We've been working on shows like American Idol for the past 12 years, since the very start of it, managing things like their voting and on air engagement. We've seen that migration happen from people calling in, to people texting in, to now more and more people going through a huge range of digital platforms, or accessing through Facebook or Twitter, and we are now starting to really see the next range of that."
Times have changed and his view of how technology is driving viewership, advertising and social media gives us insight into what is trending. Jason says that broadcast television is no longer king, "people still talk about television as the first screen and I'm not sure if that is really true anymore…especially among younger demographics, clearly technology has been such a big disrupter, they are not watching on the big screen. They are actually watching more likely on their phone or on their tablet and that is going to certainly progress further. Online video in general, but especially mobile video are really going to explode and things like TV Everywhere will be hugely important for the broadcasters and the networks as they seek to reach people in a number of different ways."
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