bejoe wrote:
Wow. Looks impressive for back in the day. I like the control room with a wall of Tube TV's and 5 technicians 'referee-ing' a QB1 game. Between the labor costs and licensing fees with NFL, it's no wonder they dropped it.
I know most trivia players never understood the importance of QB1, so let's go over a few things.
QB1 was NTN/BT's first game, trivia was added later so customers had something to play when it wasn't football season. But QB1 always made money, it essentially paid for people to play trivia. Trivia has never made money for BT.
The average QB1 player was much more important to advertisers than the average trivia player. And there was never any shortage of advertisers for QB1. That's why the prizes were always so much better for QB1 than trivia. Over the span of 5 years from 2001-2005 they gave away one Dodge Ram truck per year. For 15-20 years they gave away multiple Pro Bowl trips to Hawaii every year for the top players, at least one year they gave away a Super Bowl trip to the #1 player that year. What's the biggest prize BT has awarded to a trivia player? In short, QB1 was a gold mine for BT.
The reason it was dropped was simple. And complicated. In short, the game was no longer sustainable because TV feeds throughout the nation were no longer synchronous. The game relied on everybody across the nation seeing the same thing on their TV at the exact same time. When digital feeds started in 2004 this began to change, and within a few years there was no way to have a level playing field. That's why it was dropped. It certainly had nothing to do with paying the three people per game it took to run QB1.
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