How Netflix brought interactive voting to ‘Star Search’

On January 20, Netflix is bringing back the popular talent competition Star Search, with a twist: For the first time in its history, Netflix will let its audience decide the outcome of a show with live voting. However, unlike how shows have done this in the past, audiences won’t have to send text messages or call a special number to make their votes count. Instead, viewers will vote with their TV’s remote control, or right within the Netflix app if they watch the show on their phones.

Netflix hopes that this level of simplicity will help to make live programs like Star Search a lot more exciting, and offer its audience a chance to experience shared watercooler moments that tend to be missing from today’s world of hyper-personalized streaming. “You can influence the outcome [together with] everyone at the same time,” says Netflix member product VP Elmar Nubbemeyer. “You’re part of the Zeitgeist at that moment.”

To bring real-time voting to Star Search, Netflix relied on work it previously did for interactive narrative shows. It also snuck voting tests into David Chang’s Netflix show, and showed focus groups segments from two fake shows it cooked up for testing purposes.  The company even built internal tools that will help it to repurpose live voting and polling for other live events and shows in the future.

“We are planning more of these types of moments,” says Netflix product designer Navin Iyengar. “Star Search is really the big unveiling of it.”

From ‘Bandersnatch’ to Star Search

When Star Search debuts Tuesday evening, viewers will have two distinct opportunities to make their voices heard. Once a singer or comedian is done with their performance, a graphic will pop up on screen, encouraging each viewer to give it a rating ranging from one to five stars. “We knew early on that giving a star rating as an interaction was really important,” says Iyengar. “It’s core to the Star Search IP.”

Later on, they’ll also get the chance to choose their personal champion of the night out of four choices presented next to each other on screen. Each voting graphic will remain on screen for about 60 seconds, and the show’s host—Anthony Anderson, best known for the ABC sitcom Blackish—will respond to the incoming vote tally in real time.

It’s the first time Netflix has done real-time voting like this, but the company has been experimenting with getting viewers more actively involved for almost a decade. In 2017, the streaming service released its first interactive TV shows, which prompted viewers to choose their own adventure through branched narratives. In one scene of “Bandersnatch,” an interactive episode of the dystopian sci-fi show Black Mirror, the viewer has to decide whether the main character should take his medication by pressing left or right buttons on their remote control, with different choices leading to vastly varying outcomes. 

Even in those early days, Netflix engineers and designers already thought about ways to bring the same kind of interactivity to live content. “We always felt that interactive experiences should go live, because members could actually interact in the moment and impact the story as it’s happening in real time instead of  filming all the different potential outcomes,” recalls Iyengar.

Netflix eventually discontinued branched narrative shows because they did not take off with consumers, but the company kept pursuing the idea to marry live content with interactivity. And when Star Search came along, it quickly became clear that this was a perfect opportunity to bring back some of that interactive tech first built for titles like Bandersnatch, and use it to improve the way audience participation is usually done.

Talent shows like American Idol used to rely heavily on phone calls to register votes, but nowadays use a mix of online and text message voting. Shows often allow participants to vote multiple times, leading to massive vote counts, which often dwarf the number of voters. 

“It’s a surprisingly low share of viewers who actually reach out and vote,” Iyengar says, adding that industry estimates put that number somewhere between five and ten percent. “Voting has always been difficult for these shows,” he adds.

Netflix employees believed that the tech first built for Bandersnatch, which allowed viewers to send feedback with their TV remote, would already go a long way towards making it easier to participate. But they quickly realized that great tech alone wasn’t enough.

Keeping voting fair, even for Star Search

Netflix began testing prototypes for live voting with focus groups nearly a year ago. To do so, the company repurposed two existing titles—a dating show and a talent competition. “We basically made fake shows,” Iyengar says. “We edited them down to make them feel live and make it feel like your vote was really important.”

Then, it put select viewers into a lab designed to look like a living room, with a double-sided mirror to observe how they reacted. “We put our prototypes on a TV,”  Iyengar says. “We had a TV remote that could control it. People were sitting on a couch, and we would actually just leave them alone.”

Netflix researchers just told test participants that they get to take a peek at a prototype, without explaining that the show would allow them to vote. “People really got it,”  Iyengar recalls. “Almost everyone, without prompting from us, would pick up the remote in these moments, and interact.”

In fact, people didn’t just get it—they got hooked. “We found that they got really invested in the stakes of the show, even though it was fake,” Iyengar says. “They wanted to know what their vote was going to do. Did the person I voted for win? Show me the math for how you actually calculated the vote. People just took the idea of voting and fairness seriously.”

Netflix built its voting tech to only allow one vote per Netflix profile. But those early tests showed that fairness was as much about the way different options were presented, and that long held beliefs about UI design could introduce perceived biases.

One example: Designers like Iyengar like to direct the eye to simplify smart TV interfaces. When you open up the Netflix app on your TV, you’ll find that one title is always pre-selected, which helps to understand what to do if you want to navigate to the title right next to it, or perhaps one in a row below. “On TV, you should always have something in focus,” he says. “Otherwise people don’t understand where the focus state is.”

When Iyengar’s team built the interface people will use to award stars to Star Search performers, they initially followed that same principle, and highlighted the third star to direct the eye. Test audiences immediately pushed back. “People did not like that we were filling up the stars for them,” he says. “They were like: why are you voting for me?”

Voting on tuna sandwiches … and sports competitions?

In addition to the interface, Netflix also built a dedicated tool called Pollster that allows producers to integrate voting into their shows, then trigger each round in real time. To test Pollster and the backend tech for voting ahead of this week’s Star Search premiere, the streamer snuck a few test votes into Diner Time Live, a live cooking show hosted by celebrity chef David Chang.

Diner Time Live is not a competition, so testing star ratings didn’t really make sense. David Chang’s team nonetheless embraced the idea, and let the show’s audience rate different kinds of sandwiches. “It wasn’t something high stakes,” Iyengar says. Audience participation was nonetheless high. “I’m really glad we did it,” he says. “We learned a lot.”

The streamer is now ready to put those lessons learned to the test with the premiere of Star Search on Tuesday – and already has plans to bring it to additional live entertainment formats in the future. “We have many other ideas where we could apply this technology,” Nubbemeyer says. “One of the things we’re [considering] is polling.” Netflix may, for instance, use its voting tech to ask viewers of a sports event to decide who the most impactful player is.

“All these things could enrich the entertainment experience by making it more participatory,” Nubbemeyer says.