Big Brother is listening, too

Johannesburg, 05 Sept 2002

Spyline, an audio system that allows Big Brother II fans to listen in on the housemates, has clocked up a remarkable success record since the start of the new show in July.

The system, which is in operation 24 hours a day, allows viewers to listen in on their favourite housemate when visuals are not accessible, and even lets fans spy on them when they are not observable on screen, thanks to an audio-device that is attached to each of the housemates.

Siemens Enterprise Solutions provided the makers of Big Brother with Aspect, a call centre solution capable of allowing up to 240 callers to listen in on one housemate at any given time, for a maximum of 10 minutes.

Since the start of the show on 23 July, a total of 52 000 minutes - or 866.6 hours - of listening time has been recorded.

"The concept of the Big Brother Spyline immediately appealed to us, and we believe that an average of 1 000 calls per day testifies to the popularity and success of the project, especially taking into account the fact that the Spyline number has only been advertised on the DSTV channel and not on any other media platform," says Hylton Keshwar, account manager at Siemens Enterprise Solutions.

"We also set some kind of record when our Procenter Group took the project from concept design through to on-site implementation within two weeks."

The Aspect solution is fully automated and has built-in intelligence, meaning that when a housemate is evicted, the system is flexible and seamlessly adjusts to the changed situation. Siemens says the technology is sophisticated enough to handle high traffic in a robust and reliable manner - as the lack of fault reporting shows.