As a player and a manager at a restaurant with BT, please allow me to echo and add to the comments already posted.
The player in me wants to shout, "Of course you should have BT at your new restaurant!" as I selfishly want to have more places to play. And like others have noted, when I travel, I look for BT sites. (I have played, for example, with BUD above. Great guy!)
The restaurant manager in me is quite a bit more measured. As recently as the late 90's/early 00's, it didn't take much more to have BT pay for itself than keeping your devices charged and BT on a couple TV's. There was an active player community that BT fostered with a discussion board and a forum for site reviews. People all over the continent knew each other and corresponded regularly. For reasons that may have made sense at the time, BT got rid of both of those fora, hampering the ability of the players to foster the community. New Scaratings is great and I am fond of my fellow posters here, but it is a pale echo of the BT forum.)
Around the same time, BT made a few horrific changes to the game it offered, including dumbing down the content, adding games geared toward 20-year olds, purposely scheduling repeat games and splitting the network in two. All of these decisions have since been reversed, but the damage was significant. The regular player base was eroded bigly.
BT has also seems to spend a lot of time and money on everything but maintaining and improving the one successful product they have: real-time, continent-wide trivia with nearly instant results. A most egregious example of this is the hiring of a bar consultant, ostensibly to provide resources BT customers could use to enhance their businesses. In reality, he provided information that was blatant common sense and/or was available from any number of other sources for free. BT tries to keep up with new technology, social media and entertainment trends, but they always seem to be a touch behind the curve and anemic. Ironically, this drives their end-users, the players, to the very media that is BT's competition. I.e., BT moving the majority of their social interaction to Facebook encourages people to be on FB, which they do on their phones, at the bar, instead of playing BT. Their "live trivia" just isn't as good as actual live trivia (even with its warts), pushing players to seek out the real thing. I recognize the need to keep up with the times, but these moves have driven more players away from BT.
All that having been said, it's still possible to use BT successfully, but it really does take more commitment now than it used to. You, or a manager, or a few charismatic employees, have to promote BT actively by playing with your patrons, understanding how the network and the games work, knowing how to help patrons log in, etc. At Stewart's, we still have regular players throughout the day, but not nearly as many as we used to. We still have a top-ten Wednesday night Six team, but that's likely because I play and encourage others. Most notably, we have "Game Days" on Sundays after football is over until it's too nice outside. We give away prizes to people playing the regular BT trivia through a number of games (i.e., not just to the first place player). We are so successful with this that we order extra Playmakers for three months and often see better numbers on those Sundays than we did during football season. I know other bars give out drinks for national #1 individual or site scores. (Watch the national rankings any weekday afternoon for the New Smyrna, Florida bars to see the results of that.)
While BT has sporadic episodes of helpfulness in fostering friendly competition among sites, a lot of what we do seems to be successful regardless of their actions or even despite them. Much depends on your individual BT rep. We've had several, some better than others. On a bright note, the folks who man the BT customer service lines are among the best and most responsive I've ever encountered. Many have been there for years and understand the actual product much better than the revolving-door executives that run the company.
I think its also important to point out the passive users of BT trivia. These are your patrons who have never and will never pick up a Playmaker, but who nonetheless pay attention to the BT TV. While it's more difficult to measure their precise numbers, we believe they are a significant demographic for us. That said, there are other things that may offer a distraction for them more cheaply, but it's still important.
I hope I don't sound too negative. We have had success with BT for more than 20 years. We still get travelers from all over the country who seek us out because they've seen us on BT. It just takes a little effort.
I hope some of this is helpful to you in some way. If you have any questions or want specifics on things we do at Stewart's, feel free to PM me.
-AKBAR/Shawn S.
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