A live audience watching and rating short video pilots at an event

Case study

Testing 20 TV pilots with a live audience, and capturing the proof

Glasgow Telly Festival · Media & TV production

How a purpose-built event app let a Glasgow festival audience watch and rate more than 20 short TV pilots, turning an afternoon into 200+ structured critiques for a new way of commissioning.

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The situation

The client had a bold idea for getting production companies and networks to back TV series that break the standard commissioning mould. Rather than pitch finished formats, the plan was to commission more than twenty one-minute pilots, put them in front of a real audience, and let structured feedback show which ideas had legs.

That needed a way to show the pilots and capture reactions to each one, live at an event, the Glasgow Telly Festival, without festival-goers filling in paper forms or losing track of which pilot they were rating.

What we did

A home for the pilots

We built a platform to host and present the twenty-plus one-minute pilots, so each could be watched cleanly by an audience.

Feedback against every pilot

We captured audience votes and responses tied to each individual pilot, so the data stayed structured rather than becoming a pile of loose opinions.

An app for the day

The festival ran on an app attendees used throughout: watch any of the pilots, rate each one, move on. Simple enough for a busy event, robust enough to keep the data clean.

Selected screens

A look at the system

Representative screens from the delivered application. Data shown is illustrative. Real client and consultant information has been replaced.

Home screen of the event app welcoming attendees, with the Glasgow Telly Festival branding — The app attendees used on the day, putting the audience “in control of telly”, one minute and one pilot at a time.

One Minute Pilots section explaining how attendees watch and rate each short pilot — How it worked for the audience: watch any of the one-minute pilots, then say whether you’d like to see more, with an optional comment, no paper forms.

Feedback summary table showing likes, dislikes, comments and approval percentages for each one-minute pilot — The feedback dashboard: every pilot with its votes, comments and like/dislike split, turning an afternoon of reactions into a structured evidence base. Pilot titles shown are illustrative.

Outcomes

The results

200+ audience critiques captured over a single ~5-hour event
More than 20 pilots tested with a live audience
A structured evidence base used in conversations with networks
A repeatable, low-cost model for testing commissioning ideas

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