TWO brothers from York have launched a virtual pub quiz app to entertain the nation during the coronavirus lockdown.

Alan and John Leach, who founded tech company SpeedQuizzing, hope to provide much-needed entertainment to home-bound Brits.

They say 22,000 pub quizzes are played every week in the UK by about 100,000 people.

Following the lockdown announcement, pub quizzes looked like they would become another casualty of the COVID19 outbreak.

But SpeedQuizzing has come up with a solution, enabling hosts around the globe to remotely run fast-paced, interactive online quizzes, with players able to play from their own homes.

The York company has created an online hosting platform and a free-to-download app, SQLive, which can be used to both host and play interactive online quizzes.

Users need a reliable internet connection and 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 each other.

SpeedQuizzing hosts can run quizzes on the platform using their existing digital question packs free of charge. New hosts need to purchase a downloadable question pack, through SpeedQuizzing.com for a minimal fee to access the software.

Players get 10 seconds to respond to each question before the host reveals the answer, and team scores are automatically calculated, with the winner announced at the end of the quiz.

There are no geographical restrictions 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.

Alan 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.

"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.”

Download SQ Live through SpeedQuizzing.com