Loco, an HQ Trivia-inspired game, asks ten multiple-choice questions and offers real money

More than 20,000 people in India tuned in to a new app on Tuesday to watch a quick-witted host ask them ten multiple-choice questions. The lure? If they answered all the questions correctly, they would be rewarded with real money.

The app, called Loco, is only a month-old but it is quickly winning users in the country. Developed by three former employees of learning platform Unacademy, Loco holds two 15-minute live-streamed quiz sessions each weekday and one each on weekend. The questions abruptly escalate from one topic to another. On Tuesday afternoon, the show began with a question about radius, and then five minutes later, tested people's knowledge on cricket.

Last week, the app saw more than 7,500 odd people playing the trivia game at the same time. On Tuesday evening, 11,000 people participated in the game simultaneously. Several factors have contributed to the significant growth, Abhishek Madhavan, chief executive of Loco, said.

As more people come onboard, the cash prize has swelled. On Tuesday, the cash prize at both of the sessions was ₹10,000. The newly appointed host, Gaurav Kapur, who appears in several cricket shows, is also drawing in more viewers, Madhavan said.

"We have not spent any money on marketing so far," he said. "More than 80 percent of the new users have heard about the app from their friends." By the end of the quarter, the company expects to see half a million users, he added.

Loco is now in a position to spend more money than it did before. Until earlier this month, it was self-funded. But recently it got acquired by Sequoia Capital-backed startup Pocket Aces for an undisclosed amount.

The inspiration of the game, which Madhavan and his colleagues started to explore in late October, came from China's We Go Live, which has north of 200 million users, and HQ Trivia, a similar live-streamed game show.

HQ Trivia, which at present is officially available only for users in the United States and UK, has become a phenomenon of sorts in the last six months, drawing in more than a million users to the app.

Neha Dharia, a Bangalore-based independent analyst, says the success of HQ Trivia and other apps that rely on video streaming reflects how many people consume content now.

"The manner in which content consumed by the digital generation is fundamentally changing, not only is content consumed on the go via mobile devices but consumers want to engage more with the content, they want to be part of the content, so much so that it is no longer a one way consumption of content but is very much an engaging digital experience for the customer," she said.

"As trends like location sharing, real time updates and live video streaming become even more popular the content consumption be it gaming, video or music that too is shifting to being consumed live via digital tools, which also allow the same content to be engaging as well and make the audience a part of the content itself," she added.

Advertisers are also excited about live-streamed game shows. The real-estate value as thousands of people offer their undivided attention to the screen is huge. In the coming months, Madhavan says Loco would explore advertisement on the app, though he isn't in a rush.

Next on the team's agenda is releasing an iOS app, which Madhavan says should be out in the next ten days, and adding support for more local languages.