Real-time (well, within the month, anyway) trivia topics

There are varying definitions of "real-time," depending upon your industry. If you are a computer aided dispatch user, "real time" might be measured in seconds - if you measure it in minutes, someone could die.

NTN Buzztime trivia is not quite a life-or-death situation, so they're happy to measure "real-time" on a month-by-month basis. But in this case, that's good enough.

In a blog post, the Buzzers discussed their new Friday night game Trendalicious Trivia. It originated in a one-time Twilight trivia contest, which produced some interesting results:

We came up with a plan to hijack the half-hour Countdown game after Spotlight on Friday nights in November to see how many of our players were Twi-hards like us.

Fast forward four weeks and we found that game play, registrations and interactions with our social media pages increased quite a bit. Why? It wasn’t about catering to a demographic or even bowing down to pop culture per se. It was about relevance – pure and simple.

So they created the Trendalicious Trivia game on a permanent basis.

Airing Friday nights after Spotlight, Trendalicious will focus on one topic per month — sometimes broad (think the debut month’s 90’s topic) and sometimes specific (ala Twilight). The objective here is to test players about the things that are being talked about out in the world, at the moment, whether it’s vampires or vacation spots.

As we evolve the game, we envision themes and content that are culturally relevant, challenging and most-importantly fun.

However, I'm sure that some people will be angered by the game BECAUSE of its relevance. If you play Buzztime trivia frequently enough, you'll eventually run into questions that you've seen before, which increases your chances of winning. Presumably that won't happen in Trendalicious Trivia, so frequent fliers won't do as well as they do on some of the other games.

The Pulse?

A little cryptic note in a March 4 blog post from NTN Buzztime:

Welcome Ladies and Gentleman to Part One (of a Three-part series) of our Sports blog covering NCAA basketball March Madness! The goal of this blog is to help you when it’s time to fill out your bracket and eventually to beat our new product ‘The Pulse” (stay tuned…).

As this promo shows, the game takes real-time information (such as a current sports score) and matches trivia questions to it. I've never played QB1 (the NFL-based game), but it's presumably similar to that.