NO DEAL! NBC's Shameful "Lucky Case" Promotion

If you watch NBC's early evening game show, "Deal or No Deal," you can't but help to be bombarded by promotions for the show's "Lucky Case Game," which allows a lucky viewer at home to win $10,000.

Lucky indeed!

The Lucky Case promo appears several times during the show, with the "winner" announced at the end of the show.

The real winner, of course, is NBC and various cell phone companies. NBC does disclose that viewers who text a message to the Lucky Case Game will be charged a $.99 "premium" text message charge. Or, if you want, you can play for free over the internet. But the promotion makes clear they want you to text in your message; and, after all, it's a lot easier to do that while your fanny is sitting on the couch in front of the boob tube than it is to boot up the computer, find the website and enter online.

What I want to know, is how much of the cut on those text messages does NBC get? Dollars to doughnuts, its more than $10,000! The show has between 12-17 million viewers (depending on the night of the week it's aired)--sadly, NBC's highest rated show. If just five percent of those viewers play the Lucky Case game, then that generates 600,000--850,000 text messages at nearly a dollar a pop. That's a lot of money, and you can bet that NBC isn't giving away all that promotional time for free.

(On American Idol, which also generates a large volume of text messages, it works differently. First, there's no premium; second, Cingular Wireless gets a promotional consideration, for which it presumably pays Fox.)

So, some Lucky Case. For "giving away" a paltry $10,000, NBC and a bunch of unnamed cellular companies rake in hundreds of thousands (or more) in text message fees.

Just remember this: try the same thing at home (sell hundreds of thousands of $1 tickets for a $10,000 prize) and you'll be going to jail--its illegal (charities excepted).

No Deal Howie!!!