Foto: Ara.cat
Léelo en español
The second season of the successful musical contest Eufòria of the leader public Catalan TV channel TV3 has chosen the winner. The latter has been the audience’s favorite of the three finalists, Alèxia, Carla, and Jim Gómez.
In the last and thirteenth gala, they had returned to relying exclusively on the criterion of the viewers. Through an online voting system, the audience could determine the winning contestant. A record 300,000 votes were cast, with an audience of 410,000 viewers and a screen share of 26.2%, better than a Barça-Madrid match.
The success of the program is unquestionable. The formula of talent shows has been reaping millionaire audiences for years, and plagiarism has been controversial. For example, the successful talent show Operación Triunfo, broadcasted since 2001 in more than 70 countries, whose intellectual property belongs to the production company Gestmusic, formalized a complaint for plagiarism to both the organization CCMA responsible for public Catalan TV and radio channels and the production company Veranda TV.
In any case, I arrived home late on Friday night and had dinner in front of the screen. I was surprised by the program’s decision to give so much prominence to a jury probably inexperienced in the matter as we were many of the viewers. I didn’t know how to vote either, so I kept an eye on the mechanics.
Focusing the camera on the QR code that appeared in the corner of the screen, I linked to the voting server. I wanted to know how they would limit the votes per viewer, although it is true that they did not talk about thousands of viewers voting but thousands of votes cast. It sounds like the same thing, but it’s not.
Only some have three browsers installed on their mobile phones, but I do. Due to my professional activity, we often have to check the digital performance in different browsers, which is why. Specifically, I can browse with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari from the same mobile device.
The program’s voting opening time was quite long. So I had time to test it. When unsure whether I could express three votes, I voted for each finalist in one of the browsers. Whenever I clicked on my supposed favorite, the server thanked me for voting.
Well, I thought, there’s a problem here! I tried again with the three browsers in incognito mode, and the server thanked me again for participating. I had already cast 6 votes, two per finalist. I deleted browsing data, closed browsers, and tried again. I released 12 votes, four per finalist, to balance my test.
Tired of voting so many times, I didn’t want to try changing IP with my virtual private network provider. Still, I could have replicated the voting round by accessing from any country worldwide.
I don’t know if the server somehow netted the votes by device ID, but no warning appeared for my multiple choices. So, how representative were the percentages of votes per contestant?
I want to stay with the worthy finalists and even more with the winner Jim Gomez; I gave them the same number of votes because it was not about cheating. But it would be nice if the audience knew the security and filtering measures of the voting system to avoid the one with the most tech geeks among its fans could win. I recently read that Got Talent incorporated an SMS confirmation system to validate the vote and avoid multiple voting.
Philipp Fürst 