TV Powww (often stylized as TV POWWW) was a franchised television game show format, in which home viewers controlled a video game via telephone in hopes of winning prizes.

History

The TV Powww format, produced and distributed by Florida syndicator Marvin Kempner, debuted in 1978 on Los Angeles station KABC-TV as part of A.M. Los Angeles, and by the start of the next decade was seen on 79 local television stations (including national superstation WGN as part of Bozo's Circus) in the United States, as well as several foreign broadcasters. While most stations had dropped TV Powww by the mid-1980s, stations in Australia and Italy were still using it as late as 1990.^[1]

Stations were originally supplied with games for the Fairchild Channel F console, but following Fairchild's withdrawal from the home video game market, Intellivision games were used. Kempner later unsuccessfully attempted to interest both Nintendo and Sega in a TV Powww revival.^[2]

While the underlying technology was standardized across participating stations, the format of TV Powww's presentation varied from market to market. Many presented TV Powww as a series of segments that ran during the commercial breaks of television programming (a la Dialing for Dollars), while some (such as KTTV in Los Angeles) presented TV Powww as a standalone program.

Gameplay

In the video game being featured, the at-home player would give directions over the phone while watching the game on their home screen. When the viewer determined that the weapon was aiming at the target, they said "Pow!", after which that weapon would activate.

Accounts vary as to what kind of controller technology was involved. Some sources state that the gaming consoles sent to the stations were modified for voice activation.,^[2] while a 2008 WPIX station retrospective reported that stations without the special voice-activation-equipped consoles would have an employee in the control room manually hit the fire button when the caller said "Pow!" (or "Pix" (pronounced picks) in WPIX's case).^[3]

One of the pitfalls of the gameplay was that, due to broadcasting technicalities, there was significant lag in the transmission of a television signal. The player would experience this lag when playing at home, which likely made playing the game somewhat more difficult. (For similar reasons, such a game would be impossible in digital television without the use of a second video chat feed for the player, due to the time it takes to process and compress the video stream; most stations also mandate a seven-second delay to prevent obscenities from reaching the air.)

Featured games

TV Powww variants

See also

• The Golden Shot (similar British program with a play-at-home element)

References