For seven Fridays in a row Danish public service broadcaster DR1 has crushed the competition with the brand new entertainment format All Against 1 from Nordisk Film TV – a Banijay Group Company. The show topped the ratings for weeks, peaked at a 51.5% share for its final show and had an average share of 43.7% for the season. Never before has an app been integrated and used to this extent, and during the entire airing time the app was number one in the iTunes Store and on Google Play.

So what is it? It is a live studio entertainment show with a very simple premise: can one person beat the entire nation? One contestant is pitted against the viewing audience in a game where the questions are funny experiments – most of them performed live around the studio. The contestant has to get closest to guessing the correct outcome of the experiments – and so do the viewers at home. The viewers play along in the show’s app and they all answer together as an average. If the contestant wins, he or she gets a money prize. If the nation wins, one lucky viewer is phoned from the studio and wins the money instead.

The interactive hits of the future need to give viewers a more compelling reason to tap on their app

Pretty straight forward. It really is all against one. But what has made it so hugely successful – especially with family audiences?

It’s live – and you can feel it. It’s like a soccer match: You can’t wait and stream. You have to tune in and play your part. Without the audience there is no opponent to the contestant in the show, and the audience gets rewarded for their effort: They have a chance at winning the show’s prize.

It’s real interaction. It’s not a show with an app. It’s a show and an app. You need both to get the full experience, and around 15% of the viewers played along as they were watching. The experiments spark discussion among the viewers, and they have bragging rights on social media if they are close in getting it right.

It’s pure fascination. The experiments has involved guessing how long time it takes 2,000 piranhas to eat a chicken, how many balloons it takes to lift a 10-year old girl and what top speed a caravan reaches if it’s dropped from 50 meters. The audience loved to make their guesses – and to see the spectacular results. And unlike other quiz shows the answers can’t be googled – and everybody from kids to grandparents can enjoy the fun of guessing with a fair chance of getting it right.

These three pillars come together to create a format that engages viewers on multiple levels – from the immediacy of the questions themselves to the involvement in the outcome – and it is this deep connective approach to format design that helped it triumph in the ratings. Second screens are no longer a novelty, and the days of surface-level app integration are long gone. The interactive hits of the future need to give viewers a more compelling reason to tap on their app, rather than browse Facebook, while watching. What better incentive than the chance to actually win the show?

Click on the image at top of this page to see the trailer for the show, which is followed by a walkthrough of the app.

The article was written by two of the senior team behind the show at Nordisk Film TV, Martin Bengtsson (Executive Development Producer) and Nicolai Würtz (Producer).