Somewhere in Europe right now, a presenter is running a licensed British game show format to camera, in a purpose-built studio, on a continuous shift. It appears in no listings magazine, and the Broadcasting Code has nothing to say about it.
These look like the real thing because in every practical sense they are. Evolution’s Deal or No Deal Live carries a copyright line describing it as “based on the Endemol Shine Group television format Deal or No Deal © 2003”, the same furniture you’d find at the end of a broadcast episode. Playtech holds an exclusive licence from Sony Pictures Television for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, extended in 2024 to run until 2028. These aren’t lookalikes. They’re the formats, licensed from the owners.
Why none of it counts as television
The Broadcasting Code applies to services Ofcom licenses, to BBC services funded by the licence fee, to BBC on-demand programme services, and to S4C. A stream in a browser tab is none of those. More interesting is why it can’t even be licensed as one. The Communications Act 2003 defines a television licensable content service and then carves out two-way services, meaning anything where an essential feature is that users send images or sounds back up the wire as well as receiving them. A live casino game is definitionally two-way: the bets and the chat travel in both directions, and that traffic is the whole point of it. The interactivity that makes it feel like the future of television is precisely the thing that stops it being television in law.
We have been here before, twice
Britain spent the mid-2000s arguing about pay-to-participate telly and never quite settled it. In January 2007 the Culture, Media and Sport Committee said Call TV quiz shows “generally look and feel like gambling” and asked the Gambling Commission to consider the point. Two months later the Government said no: they were competitions, not gaming. Ofcom eventually reclassified the format as advertising rather than editorial, with rules taking effect in September 2010. The problem stayed where it was and the furniture moved around it.
The 2008 sequel was the £5,675,000 Ofcom fine against ITV over phone-in misconduct, which Ofcom’s then chief executive called “institutionalised failure”. Then, in January last year, Ofcom took on the regulation of premium-rate services directly, listing broadcast competitions and talent-show voting among the things it now covers. The phone vote is inside the tent. The round-the-clock licensed game show with a host and a set is outside it.
What that leaves
Something, though not what you’d expect. The Commission’s standards for live dealer studios require surveillance of the gaming area detailed enough to confirm the rules were followed, and training for the people running the games, who the regulator calls croupiers. The employer calls them Game Presenters and asks candidates to enjoy being on camera. Both descriptions cover the same shift.
The training is about dealing correctly. Due to impartiality, harm and offence, the whole apparatus of editorial standards a broadcaster works to: those are Broadcasting Code concepts, and the Broadcasting Code is not in the room.
This happened during a year when linear television reached a weekly average of 54 per cent of people, on Ofcom’s own Media Nations figures, and the argument about how we pay for the rest of it got another instalment. Live studio television, meanwhile, is being made continuously, in Europe, under licence, in formats we commissioned first.