GEORGINA BURNETT, an attractive 27-year-old from the south coast of England, always wanted to be a television presenter. After graduating in English literature from Warwick University, and a stint as a headhunter, she broke into television by working at weekends as an assistant producer on an ITV football show.
Since then, a steady stream of presenting jobs on various shopping channels has led Burnett to her current role as one of the most popular faces on participation television, which is taking Britain by storm.
She is one of a small team of presenters on Big Game TV, a satellite channel that broadcasts from the old Channel Five news studio at ITN headquarters in London. Each day it offers a dozen hours of live programming where viewers phone in to answer puzzles and quizzes for cash prizes.
Burnett may not be as well known as game-show stars such as Chris Tarrant or Anne Robinson, but her employer is one of about a dozen quiz channels that have sprung up in the past couple of years and which are being hailed as a financial lifeline for commercial television.
The genre, to date largely the preserve of obscure satellite stations, will be pushed into the mainstream when ITV, Britain’s largest commercial broadcaster, launches its own interactive-gaming channel, ITV Play, in 10 days, on the Freeview platform. It will then be launched on BSkyB, the satellite television network in which News Corporation, ultimate owner of The Sunday Times, has a 37.7% stake. It will also go onto cable TV.
Television advertising revenues have slumped and commercial broadcasters are trying to boost their revenues by turning to participation TV, or call TV as it is sometimes known.
It is simple to make, cost effective and has the added benefit of allowing broadcasters to get closer to their audiences.
Here’s how call TV works. Viewers who choose to take part in quiz shows have to ring a premium-rate phone line, typically costing between 60p and £1 a call, and are charged whether or not they make it to the quiz. The broadcaster keeps most of the income from the calls, usually paying a third party for providing the interactive service.
The concept has been dogged by controversy. Tales abound of operators who fail to warn viewers they will be charged even if they do not make it through to the game, or who run quizzes with deliberately ambiguous questions to keep people ringing back. But these problems have done little to hold back the growth of call TV, and the companies behind the channels are sitting on a goldmine.
It is also an industry in which Britain can justifiably claim to be a world-beater. “There is a greater concentration of this type of programming being produced in Britain than in any other leading television market,” said Jasper Smith, chief executive of Optimistic Entertainment, the company behind the Quiz Nation channel.
Last Thursday, he led a delegation of Optimistic’s senior staff to Culver City studios in Los Angeles to oversee the American debut of Playmania, a two-hour strand of quiz and puzzle programming it has developed for the American market.
The appeal of such channels is twofold. Many viewers enjoy a sense of community from the shows, achieved from a combination of the interactivity and the small roster of presenters. “People like the fact they can switch on and see familiar faces,” said Burnett. “A lot of them are housebound and it’s nice for them to watch people that they feel they know.”
The other factor, of course, is the prize money. Big Game TV, for example, estimates it gives away £100,000 a month. ITV Play will raise the stakes significantly. One of its shows, The Mint, offers a £100,000 jackpot.
The main reason for ITV’s interest in the genre is that it can help to offset the drop in advertising revenue. At its annual results last month, the company revealed that advertising income had fallen by £50m to £1.5 billion.
It established a consumer division to dream up ways of raising income direct from its viewers to combat the decline in advertising. As well as coming up with ITV Play, this unit developed episodes of popular shows such as Coronation Street that can be screened on mobile phones.
Channel 4 has not been immune from this process. After a review last year by Ofcom, the telecoms and media watchdog, Channel 4 was told it would have to start raising more revenue from non-advertising sources. Last August it launched Quiz Call, a satellite channel, via Ostrich Media, a subsidiary of its Ventures arm. A world apart from Channel 4’s usual arts and cultural programming remit, Quiz Call is making profits after just eight months. The channel refuses to divulge how big these are, but experts predict it could make up to £10m this year.
The economics of call TV are mouth-watering. Most of the channels are run on a shoestring. An hour of programming can cost less than £1,000, while a channel may generate more than 20,000 calls in 10 or 12 hours of broadcasting per day. At £1 a shot, even after the fee to the supplier has been paid, it represents a healthy margin; between 15% and 35% is the norm.
Accounts for one such business, Quiz TV, for the year to December 2004, the latest available, show it did even better than that. It made pre-tax profits of £2m on turnover of £3.6m.
“When you have a wide audience reach, the economics are pretty powerful,” said Smith. “That’s why major broadcasters in every territory in the world are flocking to interactive programming of this kind.”
Small wonder, then, that ITV is entering the fray. It has recruited William van Rest, formerly an executive with Optimistic, to head its new channel and expects to make profits of £20m in its first year. A month-long trial this year on ITV1 and ITV2 generated £2m.
Van Rest hopes that through cross-promotion with its sister channels, ITV Play will be able to take participation TV to a new level. “Having the ITV in our name is crucial,” he said. “It allows us to cross-promote our shows, and we will have access to talent and programme brands.”
One of the first shows on the channel will be a pub quiz set in the Rovers Return, the pub in Coronation Street.
Analysts believe it is the right strategy. Theresa Wise, media partner at Accenture, a consultancy, said: “They need to experiment and innovate and this is a good way of finding out what works and what doesn’t.”
ITV has a big advantage in that its brand is trusted. Viewers should be confident they will not be ripped off and will get paid promptly if they win.
After a rise in complaints from viewers of these kinds of shows last year, Icstis, the regulator of premium-telephone-line services, issued a code of conduct for the fast-growing call-TV industry. It said that complaints peaked last autumn and have dropped, possibly as viewers become more comfortable with the way such programmes work. Integrity is vital, said David Sanderson, a director of Big Game TV, and it makes business sense. Callers who win from time to time and get paid promptly are more likely to come back.
The trust issue does little to deflect criticism that call TV is a lazy answer to the problem of having to find new sources of income. Detractors of the fast-emerging genre argue that investing in better-quality programmes would lead to greater advertising revenue.
Defenders of interactive puzzle channels insist they are the natural extension of the old radio phone-in competitions and an expansion of the formula popularised by programmes such as This Morning, which run competitions.
“I used to sit in when game shows were being recorded, such as The Price Is Right,” said Van Rest. “There would be such a huge buzz when the host invited contestants to come on down. With participation TV, that’s exactly what they are doing.”
He hopes the new channel will push the boundaries. Several other firms are trying to take the concept further by developing games that allow many players to take part simultaneously, or that will be available simultaneously on several platforms — television, mobile phone and the internet.
Last week at an industry jamboree in Cannes, television bosses from around the world got a first taste of what the future holds. Yoomedia, a quoted company that runs the Avago channel, unveiled what it hopes could be the next big thing — Tringo, a cross between bingo and Tetris, developed by an Australian software engineer. Yoomedia has the rights to develop the game as a digital-TV format. Contestants must fill up a bingo grid by putting interlocking sets of bricks together as quickly as possible. The fastest player wins.
Tringo will launch on television in the second half of this year and the company has high hopes for it.
“We think it’s much more interesting than having somebody stand in front of a camera just asking you questions,” said Michael Sinclair, Yoomedia’s executive chairman.
The more immediate problem for some of the smaller channels will be to assess the impact ITV Play will have on the market. One industry source predicted that it would “wipe the floor” with its rivals.
Others were more sanguine, arguing that it could help to boost the whole phenomenon. “It will definitely have an impact on the others, but ultimately it legitimises what we are doing by using the ITV brand on this type of programming,” said another industry source. “Anything that makes the market feel more comfortable with this has to be good.”
