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Enteraction, the social gaming subsidiary of the ETV Media Group, has launched VoteStar, the first online application to combine a global IP voting platform with a social gaming layer. Votestar is designed to increase user engagement for entertainment and media brands around the world.

VoteStar is social network agnostic and built on Enteraction’s unique social gaming framework, GameShaper. While existing Facebook voting products have been designed as a simple extension to premium rate telephony systems, VoteStar takes the whole voting experience to the next level.

VoteStar is a unique product which goes beyond simple voting, encouraging user engagement through gaming psychology and design. This carefully designed gaming layer provides clients with the opportunity to create further incremental revenue via virtual goods sales, offerwalls and branded opportunities. Votestar is available to end users as a free, paid or freemium service model.

Andy Rogers, Managing Director, Enteraction said: “In the US, social games already attract more players than TV shows have viewers. Facebook’s Justin Osofsky recently revealed that 275 million users have ‘Liked’ a TV show on Facebook and 17 of the 100 most Liked Pages represent TV shows. We feel it is time to bring TV back into the game.”

The combination of voting and gamified features offers broadcasters and production companies the opportunity to capitalise on their most valuable commodity, the entertainment brand. The Votestar team works alongside the television company to manage this new area of customer interaction.

VoteStar is built upon the proven GameShaper framework and specifically designed to provide auditable, secure and scalable transactions. Through integration with the social gaming framework, we can leverage the social graph to capture user data well beyond simple voting history. The system is hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure to allow for seamless scaling to meet short periods of very high demand.

A combined voting and gaming application also provides new opportunities for ad sales teams in areas such as brand partnerships, sponsorship and online advertising. Viewer engagement around a primetime event TV doesn’t need to end with the programme credits. VoteStar builds an environment for viewers to interact with their favourite entertainment brands right through to the broadcast of the next episode or series.

Andy Rogers added: “We are extremely excited about the launch of this product as we genuinely believe it will revolutionise the social space around entertainment’s megabrands.”

For more info visit www.votestar.tv