Don’t you absolutely despair of our major commercial television broadcaster when you read a headline like this:
ITV turns to phone-in competitions to beat ad slup
It turns out that those trivially easy competitions on This Morning earn £9m a year, while ITV Play is expected to bring in £20m this year.
This is all cash that the viewer is paying directly to the broadcaster – except that the viewer pays even more since that the viewer’s telecoms supplier and the TV company’s telecoms operator each take hefty chunks too.
And in case you hadn’t noticed, your local ITV “news” programme is also running plenty of competitions. This week London Tonight is offering tickets to the Rolling Stones each evening:
One source said each ITV1 regional bulletin was being encouraged to have one competition a day, news events permitting, although the spokeswoman denied there was any edict to this effect.
Well it’s nice to know that if there’s a major story in London, the competition might be dropped.
The most interesting bit of the report comes at the end:
However, the growing revenues from premium-rate phone-in competitions could face a threat from a Gambling Commission public consultation.
The consultation will question the legality of many prize draws and competitions, a process that could threaten the business models of “participation TV” operations such as ITV Play.
It has been prompted by changes in UK gambling industry laws that will come into force late next year.
The consultation will consider whether the simple questions used in various televised quizzes – that generate money from consumers calling premium-rate phone lines – are a form of gambling.
It will also look at whether the question formats used by Channel 4’s Quiz Call, ITV Play and quizzes on shows such as This Morning and Richard and Judy require any skill or if, like a lottery, they are a game of chance.
If such games are classed as lotteries, they will have to be regulated and 20% of revenue must go to charitable causes.
Let’s face it, these are lotteries rather than games of skill. In which case, I believe that the viewer ought to know what the odds of him or her winning are. If I do buy a Lotto ticket for the main draw, I know that it’s roughly 14m:1 that I’ll win the jackpot. But if I’m foolish enough to phone into one of ITV Play’s games, I don’t even know the odds that I get through to them.
If we’re happy letting gambling go by happily on national television on every show, then fine, but let’s call a spade a spade and face the fact that this is more gambling.