Microsoft is
hoping to turn its Xbox Live
audience into something approximating the world’s largest focus group during
the threepresidential debates and
the vice presidential debate this month. Primarily known as a gaming platform, Xbox offers
live programming and video on demand, and it is using the election to try to
raise its profile as an interactive news source and test some new technology.
Beginning
with Wednesday’s debate between President Obama andMitt Romney on domestic
policy, Xbox will be streaming the events live with interactive poll questions
for the millions of U.S. households (a precise number is not available from
Microsoft) who own an Xbox console and subscribe to the Xbox Live service.
Responses to the questions will be tabulated in real time on screen. Polling
partner YouGov will weigh the responses to bring the overwhelmingly male and
more educated and affluent Xbox population in line with the overall demographic
profile of likely voters, and release results after each of the debates. It's
not clear yet if the overall "turnout" will be among the information
released.
Interactive
polling being done on the Xbox election hub, which appears prominently on the
network’s starting page, is already providing a look at a difficult-to-target
subset of undecided
voters—those who change their mind several times throughout the course
of an election season. Xbox users are rewarded for their participation with a
virtual gift—a suit of armor for an online avatar. Microsoft plans to release
data from its polls during the debates.
David
Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft
Research, said that the audience of “tens of thousands”
of Xbox users who are providing responses to daily questions about the election
reveal hundreds of potential voters who have changed their minds from undecided
to supporting one of the two candidates, or flipped from President Obama to
Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Rothschild says that a typical survey group
for a national poll might only contain a handful of respondents who switched
their vote. The Xbox polling, Rothschild says, could potentially yield a new
level of “granularity” about the hard-to-track and little understood subset of
persuadable voters.
Xbox voters
are disproportionately undecided, according to polling commissioned by
Microsoft and conducted by StrategyOne. When the poll was conducted in June and
July, 40 percent of Xbox owners had yet to make a choice in the election.
Participants in the daily Xbox polling are invited to answer a mix of new and
running poll questions when they log on to the service. For instance, on Monday
users were presented with a series of questions about taxes, Medicare, Social
Security, and the national debt, as well as a running question on presidential
preference.
For
Microsoft, it is the “biggest-ever live interactive TV proof of concept,” says
Jose Pinero, a company spokesman. Microsoft has a long history of experimenting
with interactive television products, but here, Pinero says, the company is
“breaking the fourth wall” by allowing a real-time connection with live programming
on a single screen. Microsoft tested the technology at both party conventions,
inviting users to participate in polls during key speeches.
Live,
interactive voting can be a “powerful market-research tool,” Pinero says, with
applications for a wide variety of programming. On an American
Idol type program,
for example, it could be used to record viewer preference, and even register
approval or disapproval throughout the course of a single performance. TV shows
offer online voting, text-message based feedback, and Twitter voting, but
Microsoft thinks that putting interactivity on one screen “is the future of
TV.”
Whether it
represents the future of polling remains to be seen. The methodology has some
flaws that could skew results. For example, the programming only accepts
answers from one user ID per Xbox console, so that in households with multiple
accounts only one vote will be recorded. Pinero says that Microsoft’s polling
suggests that adults in Xbox households tend to vote the same way. Rothschild says
it’s a “tricky question” as to how to attribute a result when a whole family is
in front of the TV.
The effort is also a
way to build buzz for Xbox itself. While Pinero says the company is looking to
“motivate more people to be engaged in civic processes,” it is also planning to
launch the next installment in its wildly popular Halo franchise on Election Day
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