1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for providing entertainment services, and in particular to a system and method for allowing viewers to vote on elements of a television program.
2. Description of the Related Art
CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a challenge response test used in computing that attempts to thwart automatic machine-generated responses and assure that responses are instead provided by a human being. Generally CAPTCHA provides a series of distorted characters that cannot be easily determined via optical character recognition (OCR), requiring a human being to perceive the characters and enter them.
Online voting for reality competition shows such as AMERICAN IDOL are known in the art. Some online voting systems do not allow more than one vote per online user, and voting systems that do permit more than one vote per online user may require the user to submit each vote separately. It is undesirable to limit each online user to a single vote, because this does not account for a wide variety of user expression regarding their opinions of the contest. For example, a user may believe that one contestant is only slightly preferable to another, and a single vote applied across several contestants cannot reflect this.
Furthermore, when voting for such competitions, it is important that the voting process be fair or all candidates. For example, consider a reality competition that is broadcast live in the Eastern Time Zone. If voting were opened at the beginning of the broadcast in the Eastern Time Zone, and viewers were able to vote and commit votes before all of the candidates have performed, candidates who perform later in the broadcast will have a disadvantage in the voting, as they may have given a spectacular performance, but many viewers would have already committed all of their votes and be unable to vote for them.
Other voting scheme difficulties are a product of the fact that the competition is broadcast in the Eastern Time Zone (and typically live) and later broadcast in other time zones (e.g. the Central Time Zone, Mountain Time Zone, and Pacific Time Zone), and no longer live.
What is needed is a system and method for allowing different voting schemes that does not run afoul of CAPTCHA requirements, are fair to all candidates, and are workable with both live broadcasts and rebroadcasts in subsequent time zones. The present invention satisfies that need.