Whether you like it or not, you — the spectator — are about to become the half-time entertainment.
The next time you’re at a stadium for a concert or sporting event, you may find a message or photo you tweeted or posted on Instagram plastered across the big digital screens for all to see.
Interactive video games and polls are also about to become front and centre on the big screens, allowing concertgoers and sports enthusiasts to divert their attention from the main event during breaks to play games - or vote on who they believe might win - with their smartphones.
Two Australian-based start-ups bringing social media and games to live events are Lime Rocket and Stackla. Based in Sydney’s north, Stackla was co-founded by former digital media journalist Damien Mahoney, 44, and producer Peter Cassidy, 31, who recently won a contract to be the official social media partner for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.
The prestigious deal sees the duo's two-year-old software used to project tweets, polls and other content from social media onto 24 large screens, or "social walls", at the six stadium venues in Glasgow hosting athletics, cycling, gymnastics, hockey, rugby and netball.
Mahoney, who counts commentating Sydney AFL games on radio station Triple M and playing amateur football and guitar in a band as hobbies, says his company now hasmore than 300 clients using its technology including Fairfax Media, News Corp and other corporate heavyweights like Origin Energy, Citibank and Qantas. Because of this, the company is now expanding internationally, having recently opened offices in London and San Francisco.
He says the Glasgow deal is a big win for the company.
"I think it’s really significant," Mahoney said. "Obviously it's an event that grabs a lot of attention throughout the Commonwealth, even though it’s not necessarily a global event."
Stackla also recently expanded its platform to websites, where it can allow shoppers purchasing goods like clothes to see how they look on other people who have shared their experiences online.
Meanwhile Lime Rocket, also based in Sydney, is bringing "massively social" games to the big screens.
Already Lime Rocket co-founders Mike Gardiner, 39, and Gretchen Armitage, 40, have had some success in getting their technology out into the public, having demonstrated it before a Calvin Harris event at the Foreshore Festival in Canberra a couple of years ago. They've also gone a little rogue and used a projector in a car park after an INXS concert in Wollongong to try to get people nearby interacting with it via phones. A larger display was shown at a recent EB Games Expo.
"We have a proof of concept game that can handle 100,000 people at once," Mr Gardiner said. "That’s one of our end goals - to see 80,000 people in a large stadium playing a game before kickoff."
But first Lime Rocket is focusing on rolling the technology out at pubs, especially those running trivia nights. It's also in talks with an Australian family entertainment centre company and a firm that runs NSW sporting stadiums.
One of the first hotel chains to sign up to Lime Rocket is the Riversdale Group, which has 12 venues across Sydney. The group's Toxteth Hotel in Glebe is the first pub to make use of it for trivia nights.
Mr Gardiner said those who participated with Lime Rocket games at the Toxteth could play trivia that didn’t just involve text but could show videos from movie scenes as well. Those playing along could then have their scores added to a leader board that is tallied up once a month for prizes to be handed out.
Other games include one where you can "throw", or flick, a basketball from your smartphone onto the screen and another where you guess a phrase like in Wheel of Fortune.
In the case of the Toxteth, the person with the highest score every month wins an iPad mini. Mr Gardiner said this incentivised people to stay longer at venues and was valuable to pub owners.
"The trivia host likes it and the venue host likes it because it encourages people to get in a bit earlier [before a trivia game starts]," Mr Gardiner said. "They might buy an extra beer; they might buy a meal if they get there a bit earlier."
In addition to providing pub owners with extra revenue, Mr Gardiner said independent game developers could also benefit from his technology, as many of them often failed to generate money from cluttered app stores like Apple’s and Google’s because of the number of games on offer.
Already some game developers had expressed interest, Mr Gardiner said.