New Scaratings

http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/15/buzzt ... exclusive/

GamesBeat
Buzztime’s tablet games turn dead restaurants into party spots (exclusive)
Above: Buzztime's new OpinioNation Live game

If you’d rather not look at your date in a restaurant or bar, maybe you can play a tablet game instead. Recognizing the potential to boost activity at quiet restaurants, Buzztime provides tablets with games and interactive menus to restaurants that need more help becoming nighttime party spots.

Buzztime provides trivia games, sports competitions, poker, and other kinds of live social entertainment. Over the past four years, the number of player registrations has grown to 5 million — roughly 70 percent in the past year alone. More importantly, the games get customers to come back to restaurants.

Carlsbad, Calif.-based Buzztime, which is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has been around for three decades as a provider of in-venue entertainment. But its business has taken off in the last four years as it launched the Beond platform on Android tablets and smartphones. The platform is now being rolled out across the entire chain of 1,000 Buffalo Wild Wings restaurants. Altogether, Buzztime is at 3,000 locations, and its games are played 52 million times a day.

Vladimir Edelman, the chief development officer for Buzztime, said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat that the company is introducing its new on-demand OpinioNation Live game across its network so that restaurant and bar owners can improve traffic on slow nights. The game enables people in a local spot to play each other in a competitive game that has players guessing the most popular answers to opinion surveys. It is targeted at broader and younger audiences as it is not knowledge-dependent like trivia is.

“We can custom-brand the games as needed,” Edelman said. “We capitalizing on the excitement around mobile and tablet gaming. This is about taking the gaming experience and moving it into retail.”

Edelman said that customers subscribe to a service for around $500 a month. They receive leased 7-inch tablets and a bunch of games in a variety of genres. The tablets are inexpensive, but the screens are large enough for several patrons to look at simultaneously. Buzztime provides tools for a place to promote its events with onscreen ads, in-venue collateral, social media tips, and other resources.

Edelman said that restaurants are dead Monday through Wednesday. One new customer had about three or four teams on its first night. About four weeks later, 10 or 12 teams showed up on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Now, 25 to 30 teams show up with four or five people each.

“If you do the math, that makes a Monday or Tuesday night for a restaurant,” Edelman said. “Restaurants are learning to differentiate themselves based on the experience they offer. You’re not going to serve cheaper food than Chipotle.”


“Bottom line numbers don’t lie, and we’ve seen an increase in sales. Tuesday nights alone have increased by 30 percent,” said Steve McKinney, the general manager at JR’s Pub, an independent eatery in South Carolina.

Just one month after implementing Buzztime’s new Beond tablets at the venue, McKinney saw a 110 percent increase in overall gameplay.

Restaurants can host social game events, giving customers a reason to come back. Players can provide answers on the tablets or their own smartphones via the Buzztime Mobile Playmaker app on both iOS and Android. Professional hosts can also run more serious pro games. The platform is customizable based on what a venue wants.

“We can create a community event inside a restaurant or bar using modes of play that people are already familiar with,” Edelman said. “We’ll create more games that make sense in retail. We generate revenue by selling premium digital content to customers and share that with the venue.”

Getting return visitors is important as the restaurant is expected to hit record sales this year of $683.4 billion, according to the National Restaurant Association. But the forecasts are lower than expected due to a range of postrecession challenges. By the end of the summer, Buzztime will roll out digital menus, where you can order right from the tablet or even pay for your food on the tablet. Restaurants can offer rewards to the winners of the games.

“The hospitality industry is ripe for innovation in digital gaming, and Buzztime is in a prime position to pave the way given their decades of experience in the space,” said Michael Cai, the senior vice president of games and digital for market analysis firm Interpret. “Buzztime is providing a much-needed technology solution so bars and restaurants can capitalize on the popularity of social gaming and the live events sweeping the nation.”

Buzztime was founded in 1985, and it has 144 employees. It launched a sports-play prediction game for bars, where you had to predict what would happen next in a football game. Rivals include Ziosk and E la Carte.

“It sounds easy to do now, but in the mid-1980s, it was incredibly hard,” Edelman said. “That was a huge hit. We created a trivia network that allowed people to compete against the country. We created a poker network and began to network more clients together.”

I'm guessing Stained Glass Pub is going to see a110% game play increase this weekend.

Sample Question which didn't copy and paste:

Which 80s Toy do Beer Lovers think was the best ?

Cabbage Patch Kids
Teddy Ruxpin
Rubik's Cube
Transformers

So Vlad is saying that young people are stupid?

Playing against the country? Obviously this fucking dipshit doesn't know what the fuck his own company does.

_________________
Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

Of course Buzztime Live trivia (and probably the forthcoming opinion game as well) don't place any statistics onto the player or site pages so there is really no proof of these (or any) numbers.

But as for the trivia (knowledge) and (participation) prowess of JR's Pub of Goose Creek, South Carolina, there are these:

They held a player vs. player Showdown competetion that ran eight weeks from April into June. The first week there were 12 players. The 2nd and 3rd week there were none, and they never reached 12 again. The winner was crowned having played 3 of the 8 weeks (and played a 4th Showdown somewhere else!), with a total 109,000 points. a "4 day 3 night vacation" was the prize.

Next, through June, JR's "participated" (if they even knew it) in a location vs. location Six tournament across South Carolina and finished 6th of 9, and 6th of 6 among those locations that generated any points at all.

So oh, it must be the Live trivia game, so much more interesting than Showdown or Six, that is making their day over there.

Goose Creek South Carolina JR's Pub (site id 38190) looks for all the world like one of those locations that won't have Buzztime a year from now.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I actually read the entire article, and please excuse my skepticism, but it sounds like a bunch of advertising bullshit to me. I don't know who is running NTN these days, but it's starting to look to me that they are getting desperate trying to save their company in all of the wrong ways. The article says that Buzztime Trivia is in 3,000 bars. When I started playing NTN trivia, it was being played in 5,000 bars.

I will predict that we will eventually see NTN go bankrupt, and when that happens our only hope is that Buffalo Wild Wings decides to buy up the pieces in bankruptcy court.

Obviously NTN isn't a Blue Chip stock, or anything close to it. It's a company that measures success by how much they didn't lose per share. Their stock used to trade on the NYSE, now it has been relegated to the AMEX, and I'm afraid it won't be too long before it trades on the OTC market.

This doesn't look like a growth stock to me:

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stock-resea ... ny/?qs=NTN

p.s. Besides numerous misspellings and grammatical errors, the article says that NTN trades on the NYSE. I don't think this is correct, unless it somehow has dual listing. Hell, if I'm wrong about this please let me know as politely as you can without telling me that I am a complete idiot once again.

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"The game is afoot."

Same old horseshit from Carlsbad.

Only the broader ones.

Well I think BT live trivia does place stats on player pages and site pages or used to.

The Hooters in Rockville MD had BT for a while and they played BT live trivia every Wed. with a host. The live trivia stats did show under games on the site page and on player pages too.
There was about 12 to 20 boxes in use for this live game, some were solo players others were small teams with 1 box.

This Hooters had a live trivia company on Wed nights before switching over to the BT live trivia so they had a player base already established. It lasted about 6 to 8 months before all the Hooters in MD dropped BT on the same day.

I have not heard of any BT live trivia games since then.

_________________
BUD - Stained Glass Pub Silver Spring MD
OC BUD - Grotto Pizza DE near Ocean City MD

LET'S GO ....Orioles and the 9 and 5!!

Are you saying he is wrong? Digital dementia, man.

Does this mean they will quit dumbing down the trivia? That is the question here.

As I described in another thread, COOGS and I played this game in the spring at a live trivia event in Austin. Assuming one wants to play a version of "Family Feud", there's nothing wrong with the game, but I cannot imagine the "Milleniums" that NTN/BT wants to capture as its customers making an effort to go out on a specific night of the week to play it. If NTN/BT wanted to build player traffic on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, they've had more than enough opportunities to do so by helping locations with Showdown or Six promotions--something they fall short at doing even when they attempt it.

Just another reason to continue our shift to playing in live trivia events--but not NTN/BT ones.

Brooke/AARDVK

I wish that was an option in my neck of the woods. We have 3 that I know of in the whole valley. The biggest is nothing full of cell phone cheats (even though it is strictly against the rules)...

_________________
Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

Ranger, as I think we both believe, bullshit ain't gonna keep NTN in business. It looks to me like NTN is focusing on people, who are under 30, and spending their bucks in attempts to get them playing NTN games in bars, in hopes of the bar managers and owners noticing that NTN is bringing young people in to spend money.

From what I have observed, most of the under 30 group go to bars to hook up with each other, and for the most part, playing NTN games interfers with hooking up. Demographics would seem to make NTN's approach right. However, it doesn't consider the psychology of young people and what turns them on.

Perhaps, if NTN offered free motel rooms for winning games, they might get more of the under 30 group picking up Tablets or Playmaers.

(I fully understand that there are some great trivia players under the age of 30. However, they are a small minority of the age group.)

p.s. Let's see how much trouble this gets me into.

_________________
"The game is afoot."

For a long time, from the temporary removal of Countdown through the split, I've continued to support Buzztime and play it and get friends who I know will enjoy it to give it a shot. I am finally at the point where I fully expect them to crash. I will continue to play, but given the choices they are making and direction they are headed, it is only appropriate. It's getting harder and harder to justify the continued dedication. Maybe they just need to completely bottom out and overhaul their entire approach.

I also wonder how they decide what their "target demographic" desires. I have a feeling it's basically the sole discretion of their interns and younger employees who likely do not care at all about trivia. I don't think of myself as a spokesperson for the demographic by any means, but as the seemingly lone loyal Buzztime player in this age range for a very long time, I can say with confidence that they are doing something wrong. And judging by the overwhelming popularity of live write-in trivia among the exact same demographic, it is obvious why they are trying the things they are and also obvious that they won't work.

I've said it many many times: trivia is not "cool." What draws "cool" young people to trivia is free booze and the ability to show off. Buzztime will never ever achieve their target demographic by dumbing down games, focusing solely on social media, and giving meaningless awards to people who roughly resemble their target demographic. AARDVK has repeatedly said that there has to be some heavy emphasis on educating bar owners and staff on the system, and I'm realizing more and more how true this is. If getting people in the 21-30 age range really is the answer, it's the only way they can possibly compete with write-in trivia.

I don't see the point of live trivia when we have Buzztime. As a younger trivia player, what draws me to Buzztime is the fact that it keeps records. It's not about winning this week or that week, it is about seeing who is better overall. I am not saying older people do not like to mine data, but I feel like that is something that particularly appeals to the younger, tech-savvy generation. If Buzztime fell through I really do not know where I would go for trivia. I haven't found any Quiz Bowl for adults, and Jeopardy isn't purely trivia so much as a reflex game since most competitors who manage to get on there are highly skilled. And one way or the other your stint on there ends fairly quickly. Live trivia is too ephemeral for my tastes.