The Brazilian fifth edition of Big Brother has a mobile My Big Brother - which the latest game produced by Meantime Games. My Big Brother is matched up with one of the most successful and viewed TV shows in the country.
Since its first edition, four years ago, Big Brother Brazil has been a national craze, with highs of more than 60% of audience. Every week, some 30 million votes are cast by the viewers via phone, SMS or internet, to decide which HouseGuest will be evicted.
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My Big Brother turns the HouseGuests into characters and allows the player to choose one of them to take care of by feeding it and keeping it clean and satisfied.
Users of the main wireless carriers can download My Big Brother for free, and then buy a pack of credits to start playing. The game interacts with the tv show, and players choose one of the HouseGuests and take care of them buying food, hygienic items, gifts and punishing them whenever they’re not behaving. If you forget to take care of your character, he or she will abandon you and you’ll lose score.
The game is built over a client-server system, and interacts with the TV show in real-time. So, if the character you chose turns out to be evicted, you’ll need to restart all over again. On the other hand, you get extra credits every time your character wins the Head of Household Competition in real life, for instance.
Since it’s an interactive game, every event that happens in the TV show affects on your character's mood.
This focus on active content is key for mobile entertainment success. As Tapio Anttilla reports from his recent trip to Korea in his MEOW! Newsletter:
My main takeaways from the Korean experience were the following: 1. There are no mobile enterprise applications, solutions or phones to speak of - it is all about the consumer market. 2. SK Telecom is the big money-maker, not the content providers 3. ...5. Original content plays a big role (e.g. ringback tones are often based on latest soap opera content). This focus on dynamic content is very promising in my opinion.
My Big Brother is a joint project of Meantime Games and Globo.com, the internet portal owned by Rede Globo, Brazilian main TV network.
"The player can answer quizzes, buy new credits and other interactivities, all through your cell phone. It is surely the most advanced Java-based application in the Brazilian market", reveals Sergio Berson, Globo.com’s mobile technology manager.
"The game has an entirely new concept, an unseen model, and is based on a business format never tested before", adds Henrique Oilifiers, Globo.com’s games coordinator and creator of the project.
Interestingly TV Globo made a successful claim for breach of copyright based on the Big Brother format.
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The claimant was Endemol, owned by Telefonica, which owns the format.
Endemol had entered into negotiations with TV SBT of Brazil in the course of which Endemol provided extensive information on the Big Brother format.
TV SBT chose not to acquire a licence for the format and produced "Casa Dos Artistas" (the Artist's House), which the Brazilian Court described as a "rude copy".
Endemol and its Brazilian licensee for the Big Brother format (TV Globo) sued TV SBT seeking an injunction and damages, and won.
The Court made awards of damages to Endemol of approximately £400,000, and to their Brazilian licensees of over £1million.
Endemol is owned by Telefonica, who recently announced that they would float a minority stake. It is known that Telefonica regard Endomol as non-strategic and are seeking to refocus on their core.
In the meantime Meantime is finalizing work on a full-featured server platform for mobile, massively multiplayer online games.
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