73 START-UP ALLEY Codices Interactive
A HELPING HAND Codices Interactive is a start-up that has come out of Falmouth Launchpad, a £12m EU-funded tech incubator
THE KIT IS AVAILABLE ON TWITCH EXTENSIONS – A SERVICE THAT THE PLATFORM LAUNCHED IN 2017 TO ALLOW STREAMERS TO CUSTOMISE THEIR CHANNELS Monetisation templates for Quiz Kit includes getting players to pay to enter, or to buy extra lives. While developers working on Extensions typically receive a 20% share of the revenue, Edwards – who spent four years working with global brands in the VR industry – expects the bulk of earnings to come through Codices’ own sponsorship, product placement and advertising deals. He adds that Nike and Warner Bros have already signed million dollar deals with HQ Trivia, although acknowledges that, “it’s super-early days”. The company is funded by three angel investors and the eventual target, according to Edwards, is to raise £4m. Edwards spent a year researching mobile quizzes and traditional TV game shows to work out the best formats, and one of the start-up’s advisors is Nick Hall, former digital director at the Endemol Shine Group. “Creating engaging questions is important and if you’re running a knock-out quiz – it’s important not to knock out people too early on. Scheduling is also critical to gain big, peak audiences,” he says. And because the company is looking to gain a critical mass, when it launches the product next February, Codices is training its focus on the US market. And from Falmouth, this will mean putting in some late hours at the University’s recording department, where they will be juggling multiple time zones.
CODICES INTERACTIVE
COUNTRY: UK STARTED: 2018
Thanks to the runaway success of mobile quizzes such as HQ Trivia, the livestreaming of game shows is opening up new opportunities for streamers and developers. This was the inspiration behind Codices Interactive – a start-up developing new tools and formats for live, interactive game shows – which has come out of Falmouth Launchpad, a £12m EU-funded incubator, which has a remit to nurture the next generation of high growth tech start-ups in Cornwall. Codices models itself on a relatively new venture: HQ Trivia was only released on iOS and Android in mid-2017, but it has become a phenomenon in territories such as the US, where hundreds of thousands of participants compete to answer 12 trivia questions for a cash prize. By tapping the correct answers on a graphic overlay on their mobiles, users can win a share of a cash prize, which has been as high as £36k for one US-based player. The show is usually broadcast live in prime time, on a Sunday at around 9pm, and guest presenters/influencers all bring their own huge followings to the game. Rather than launch a direct-to- consumer standalone app like HQ Trivia, in an increasingly noisy marketplace Tim Edwards – Codices’ founder – decided to join forces with Amazon’s digital video streaming platform, Twitch. “On Twitch, the audiences are already there,” says Edwards. “There are also lots of
influencers who are aiming to build up big audiences by offering extra features, but it can be hard for them to build this stuff on their own.” Quiz Kit is Codices’ first offering and provides several interactive quiz formats for Twitch’s army of live streamers. The format appears as a video overlay, which takes up the bottom third of the screen while the top two-thirds feature the broadcast stream with the presenters. There is also a bank of questions, or Twitch generate an interactive, livestreaming quiz experience, one which is able to receive back data instantaneously from large groups of players. The kit is available on Twitch Extensions – a service that the platform launched in 2017 to allow streamers to customise their channels with add-ons. Twitch’s virtual currency Bits can also be used within Extensions, enabling streamers to monetise their offerings. The Extension is currently in beta and Edwards praises the support that the start-up has received from Twitch. “Our Extension was really complex and required extra functionality to handle a mass audience,” he says. “Twitch invited us out to LA where we met the team, they helped us with technical support and put us in touch with some early users.” broadcasters can add their own. All these assets are provided to
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