At NAB 2022, I sat down to talk about Zender, the interactive broadcasting platform I’d been building. The core premise was simple: traditional broadcasting is a one-way street, and audiences – especially younger ones – expect to participate, not just watch. We started with second-screen experiences where viewers interacted via their phones while watching TV, then evolved to mobile-first where the phone became the primary screen.
One of our most compelling use cases was building virtual escape rooms for Nickelodeon. Kids could work together in real time to solve puzzles during a live broadcast. We also created virtual characters that children could interact with – avatars driven by real people behind the scenes but appearing as animated characters on screen. The engagement numbers were staggering compared to passive viewing.
The technical challenge that made or broke everything was latency. Traditional broadcasting runs on 30-60 second delays, but interactive experiences fall apart above 2-3 seconds. You can’t have a quiz show where the host asks a question and the audience answers 30 seconds later. We got latency down to 1-2 seconds using Wowza’s streaming infrastructure, which was the threshold where interactions felt natural and real-time.
Content moderation turned out to be one of the hardest problems, especially with children’s content. When you open up audience participation – chat, voting, submissions – you need to filter content in real time at scale. Automated moderation helped but wasn’t sufficient on its own. We built layered approaches combining AI filtering with human moderators, and the complexity of that pipeline surprised us more than any of the streaming technology challenges.
The conversation touched on where interactive broadcasting is headed. VR and AR will eventually transform the experience further, but the fundamental insight remains: audiences want agency. They want to influence outcomes, not just consume content. The technology stack matters, but the real innovation is in interaction design – figuring out what kinds of participation actually make the experience better rather than just adding noise.
Watch on YouTube — available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.