The Million Pound Drop Case Study
M
ark Wass, Technical Manager for The Million Pound Drop
declared “by tracking money bundles using RFID, we’ve added
features to our existing control and graphics systems that not only
help the host and contestants play the game, but also help make the
game a lot faster and even more engaging for the viewer at home”.
The Million Pound Drop is a BAFTA-winning game show which
broadcasts live on Channel 4. At the start of the show, teams
of two contestants are given one million pounds cash in 40
bundles of £25,000 and must correctly answer eight multiple
choice questions to keep the money.
The game set consists of four trap doors which each correspond
to one of the possible answers. Contestants have one minute
to place all the bundles of money on one or more of the trap
doors corresponding to the answer they believe to be correct.
When time runs out, the trap doors of the incorrect answers
are released, and any money that was on them falls below. The
contestants win any money that has not been dropped down a
trap door at the end of eight questions.
During The Million Pound Drop, contestants are playing on live
television with real £50 notes. As contestants answer questions,
the show updates viewers at home and in the live audience with
the amount the playing team has saved and lost. In previous
seasons, The Million Pound Drop relied on six on stage cameras
and behind the scenes personnel to count how many bundles of
money players placed on each trap door. However, sometimes
camera angles were unreliable and the show had to have the
host, Davina McCall manually count the bundles of money on
each trap door which slowed down the speed and excitement
of the game.
Cat and Mouse, the providers of the real time graphics technology
for The Million Pound Drop, as well as other popular game shows
including Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, approached Harland
Simon to see if RFID technology could help the pace of the game.
Since the show was dealing with such large amounts of money,
Cat and Mouse needed a system that was incredibly reliable.
The RFID tags they chose needed to be read at any orientation,
since contestants often frantically stack money at odd angles on
trap doors as time is about to expire. Harland Simon’s solution,
Powered by Impinj RFID technology, provided the needed
reliability for Cat and Mouse and The Million Pound Drop.
Below the trap doors lies an Impinj Speedway Revolution reader
connected to four antennae custom designed to fit under each
trap door. Each bundle of money is tagged with a UPM Frog
3D RFID tag containing an Impinj Monza 4 chip with True3D™
antenna technology. When contestants place money bundles
on trap doors, the reader and antennae below register how many
tags are on each trap door while software uses this information
to calculate the pound value and feeds the data back to the
displays, communicating how much money contestants have
saved or lost. Impinj’s True3D antenna technology provides
the omni-directional tag performance The Million Pound Drop
needs to ensure all bundles of money are counted no matter
where positioned on the trap doors.
The RFID solution provided by Harland Simon keeps The Million
Pound Drop fast and exciting during the live broadcast. All of
the money is reliably accounted for in real time, and the host
never has to manually count it. The show is able to show more
interesting graphics of the money being moved and stacked on
different trap doors, all in real time. The Million Pound Drop has
also reaped an unexpected benefit from the technology—their
insurance rates have been reduced because they have better
control of the million pounds during the show.
Declan Begley for Harland Simon said “The RFID solution designed
and implemented by Harland Simon provides the high performance
and unmatched reliability our customer demanded for their highpressure, live telecast.”
T: +44 1908 276700 E: [email protected]
Bond Avenue, Bletchley, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, MK1 1TJ
www.harlandsimon.com
The Million Pound
Drop Case Study
RFID for Intralogistics
Visibility
Integration
Innovation
Providing visibility of complex issues, integration to
existing systems and applying innovative solutions
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and innovation as a system integrator and
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T: +44 1908 276700
E: [email protected]
www.harlandsimon.com