Rival Peak wraps with over 100 million minutes watched

Experimental interactive event Rival Peak, has come to the end of its 12-week scheduled season, and clocked up a massive 100m minutes of viewing time. 

The series was co-created by Genvid Technologies, Pipeworks Studios, and DJ2 Entertainment. And consisted of a virtual reality show, where AI contestants, guided in their choices by viewers, would try and survice the wilderness and avoid the cut at the end of every week.

The show was exclusive to Facebook. With viewers in over 70 countries, largely on mobile devices. The show grew hugely in viewership as it continued with the final week clocking on 55x more minutes than Week One. The potential audience for a second season then is massive. 

The reality show ran 24-7 for the 12 week run, with eight hour segmentation to hit audiences around the world. Its core is a video stream of the 12 contestants, with players able to choose to follow their favourite, with an HTML5 overlay to allow interaction. Then there’s a wrap-up TV show every week with Wil Weaton hosting to bring together all the action and new plot strands in the show. 

We spoke to Genvid CEO Jacob Novak about the show during its run. Who noted that triple-A publishers had taken notice and pre-production work was underway to bring a big gaming IP to the platform. 

“What’s interesting about it, from a game developer and a publisher perspective, is that it’s not at odds with the work that you do for players. Instead it expands your opportunity as a game developer to go and eat away at media time.

“And here’s what I mean. The average American watches about four and a half hours to five hours of television a day. Of which one hour is immersive, Game of Thrones, I’m paying attention. And the rest of it is, I’m cooking, I’m cleaning, I’m doing whatever and it’s on in the background. And that’s your reality TV cooking programme.

“But games are fundamentally immersive, right? They demand your attention, I’m not going to move forward in Call of Duty unless I push the button. I can’t even crush candy in Candy Crush unless I tap on the screen. And so what is the equivalent of the remaining four hours of television for video games?