SecondScreen for a national TV show with realtime pushes and crazy traffic

Nobody sits just in front of the TV and gives the TV 100% attention. In the age of Smartphones and Tablets everybody is using them while watching TV. So TV stations start to use that, they provide a SecondScreen website which is specifically built to be used while watching a TV show. With additional information of what is happening right now, ways to interact and sometimes even decide how the show continues.

We've build multiple of these websites for Swiss Television, like ones for "The Voice of Switzerland" and "Switzerland's got Talent".

In this session I will show how we have built the websites with Drupal that are capable of:

• Realtime pushes to the devices, without the necessaryness of the viewers to hit refresh
• Let the users vote on questions and how to verify them via text messages (to prevent brute force attacks)
• The admin backends we've build for the editors to work as fast as possible during the show 
• With which technologies, techniques and moduleswe've handled the crazy amount of traffic during that time
• Some insights of what has worked really well, what didn't work so well