Second-screen experiences may be evolving at a rate that is hard to keep pace with, but the old standbys remain as popular and successful as ever: voting and trivia. Now, a new widget on the website of Canadian competitive cooking show “Recipe to Riches” is combining those worlds into a singular online experience.

Naturally, the reward for a viewer who decides to vote on a competitive reality show contestant is seeing that person win. The big advancement in the “Recipe to Riches” widget, which debuted last Wednesday during the show’s on-air broadcast on CBC, is making the act of voting itself a reward. Designed by the social TV innovators at Telescope, the widget gives the viewing audience the chance to accumulate points by answering trivia questions culled from the episode. Viewers can trade their points in for up to two votes per episode on their chosen winner, with the top vote getters advancing to the next week for the continued chance to earn a grand prize of $250,000. (The voting function is only open to legal residents of Canada.)

According to Telescope CEO Jason George, the widget “demonstrates the importance of offering pervasive engagement experiences to audiences keen to interact and affect their favorite shows.” If anyone understand that importance, its George, whose company’s platform for NBC’s “Instant Save” feature on the most recent season of “The Voice” – which gave fans the chance to keep bottom-three contestants in the game during live elimination rounds – was a huge social media hit. However, that concept was also a brilliant voting innovation that brought viewers into the heart of the action in a thrilling and even visceral way. The widget for “Recipe to Riches” in comparison feels a bit redundant, essentially turning votes into a kind of currency paid out in exchange for trivia playing.

There’s a fine line between creating a second-screen experience that enhances engagement and creating one that simply throws a kink into accessing that engagement. Will “Recipe to Riches” viewers who head over to the show’s website hoping to vote on their favorite amateur cook want to take the extra step of “earning” the right to participate in an activity that generally goes without saying? They will if they also happen to like playing trivia. Otherwise, the process of registering to cast a vote, answering questions, getting those questions correct, THEN using the points earned to vote will feel like nothing but a little extra work. And in the mobile space, a little extra work goes a long way toward not participating at all.

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