Patent ID: 7921033

Claim:
A method for facilitating interactive voting over the Internet during a corresponding live television broadcast event, comprising: presenting a survey question and a plurality of responses to voters viewing the live television broadcast event; directing the voters to cast votes over the Internet at a web site of a sponsor of the live television broadcast event; transmitting each of the votes over the Internet to a server of the web site; receiving raw votes from the voters over the Internet at the web site server in response to the survey question; providing a Live Event Object residing on the server that maintains persistent connections between the Live Event Object and a database; caching the raw votes received from the voters in a memory cache of the Live Event Object for a predefined time interval, the raw votes having never been written in a database; tabulating as a batch in the memory cache the cached raw votes accumulated over the predefined time interval to generate intermediate voting results, wherein the votes are cached and tabulated in the Live Event Object prior to writing in the database; writing the intermediate voting results and each raw vote accumulated over the predefined time interval to the database at the predefined interval only after each raw vote received has been cached and tabulated as a batch in the memory cache; computing in real time a final voting result to the survey question by continuously tallying each of the intermediate voting results written in the database; and presenting the final voting results to viewers on the live television broadcast event prior to its conclusion.