June 1st 2007 was a momentous occasion for us. Discovery's Travel channel in the US were broadcasting their first Most Haunted Live - a 7 hour paranormal marathon from an ex penitentiary in Philadelphia. It was a highly interactive show including webcams pointing to different areas of the building, SMS voting, SMS to screen contributions and even fax messages from the audience. It however also featured the mobile Ghost Detector we developed for Wiretown over a year ago.

The Ghost Detector is a Mobile Java application that looks for data transfer fluctuations and interprets them on a mobile phone screen as ghostly presences. All its readings are processed by our central server and factor in performance variations between different mobile networks.

Discovery unleashed the Ghost Detector's full potential, inviting people to download it and following up by showing the most haunted towns in the US at different points during the live broadcast.

The programme received very good ratings, which always helps. US mobile take-up demonstrated to be buoyant, with over 10% of the audience interacting via their handsets. As for the Detector - a connected, Mobile Java application - thousands of US viewers downloaded it. The most surprising stat from the evening was the 90% of Detector users who volunteered their name and location to help shape the paranormal map of the US.

The Ghost Detector will continue to be distributed by the Travel Channel and we are sure it will feature live again, sometime, somewhere. It has however demonstrated that mobile participation can go a lot deeper than SMS voting.

"Not only was the Ghost Detector a professionally executed, strangely compelling application for phones, the integration of aggregated Detector data in the live broadcast - perhaps the most complex and important piece of our plan - worked flawlessly and added a differentiating interactive element to our event.

Most Haunted Live was a truly successful interactive experience, thanks in no small part to Future Platforms!"
- Seana Baruth, Dir. of Interactive Product Development, Travel Channel Media, Inc.

Read more about our work with Wiretown