A York company has come up with the perfect answer to save the pub quiz and provide much needed entertainment to home-bound Brits.
22,000 pub quizzes are typically played every week in the UK by an estimated 100,000 Brits, but following Monday’s lockdown announcement it looked like quizzers wouldn’t be getting their weekly fix for quite some time.
But SpeedQuizzing, already well-known within the pub quizzing community for its interactive quiz platform, has come up with a solution that enables thousands of SpeedQuizzing hosts around the globe to remotely run fast-paced, interactive, online quizzes, with players able to join for free and play through their smart devices from the safety and comfort of their own homes.
The quiz revolutionaries have created an online hosting platform and a free-to-download app, SQ Live, which can be used to both host and play interactive online quizzes. As well as a reliable internet connection, users require two devices to host and play quizzes; an Android device or Kindle Fire tablet (with the app enabled), to play the quiz, and a second internet-enabled device, such as a laptop, to connect to the video communications platform Zoom, enabling them to hear and interact with each other.
SpeedQuizzing hosts can run quizzes on the platform using their existing digital question packs free of charge, while new hosts simply need to purchase a downloadable question pack, containing 61 questions, through SpeedQuizzing’s website for a minimal fee to gain full access to the software. The quizzes are fast paced, with players given 10 seconds to respond to each question before the correct answer is revealed by the host and team scores are automatically calculated and maintained by the software, with the winner announced at the end of the quiz– exactly as they would be if it was being played down the local pub. There are no geographical restrictions in terms of where players can join from, meaning, for example, that a family of players in Penzance could enter a quiz that’s being hosted by a quiz master in Aberdeen.
Commenting on what makes SQ Live different to any other online quiz, SpeedQuizzing co-founder Alan Leach said: “The problem with so many online quizzes is that they’re a bit of a faff to play, very susceptible to cheating and incredibly slow to deliver the results, with players sometimes waiting up to a day to find out how they have fared.
“With SQ Live, we’ve successfully managed to address all of these issues. Our app enables players to answer directly through their Android device, while the 10 second time-limit massively reduces opportunities for people to cheat. And there’s no waiting a day to hear how you’ve done – our app automatically calculates and maintains scores, with the top placed players or teams announced immediately at the end of each quiz.
“We hope that, during these difficult and extraordinary times, our app will serve to bring people together, remotely of course, and provide some much needed entertainment and fun, with people able to enjoy everything that’s great about the pub quiz from the safety and comfort of their own home.
“And the good news is that SQ Live will only get even better; we created it as a team in an incredibly short space of time last week, so it’s still in Beta mode currently, and we’ll be working hard to iron out any existing faults or niggles over the comings days and weeks. As part of this work, we’ll be making our app compatible with Apple devices too.”
SpeedQuizzing is a family run company, headquartered on the outskirts of York, which directly employs 15 people, including five question writers who create and add 1,500 new questions to SpeedQuizzing’s question database every month.
SQ Live can be downloaded from SpeedQuizzing’s website.
