how does "ask the audience" work?

Have you ever watched a game show and wondered to yourself how the "ask the audience" feature works? It's an intriguing question and one that allows viewers at home to feel significantly more involved than they could while watching a regular show.

Basically, "ask the audience" is when a game show host will offer contestants a life line of sorts. The host will make an appeal for help from the at-home audience by leaving questions open for their opinion or expertise. Depending on the show, sometimes contestants can select this option to use if they don't know the answer, or it can be randomly selected if the contestant is stumped.

And unfortunately for them, audiences at home won't be able to offer too much help in real time as most shows like "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" are prerecorded shortly before airing; however, producers still need viewers' input for accurate results. This means that one of two methods is used with "ask the audience."

If contestants are given an option to select this lifeline, producers often use smart phones and tablets stuffed with text-polling applications. Similar to online polls, applicants at home will provide answers and opinions on whatever question is being asked based on those multiple choice options while producers tabulate the responses chosen by viewers a certain amount of time and later present those answers either verbally or as a visual graph on television.

On other shows like "Deal or No Deal," producers will usually take into account viewer trends from previous airings so they can match that data with results from virtual polls they launch during the recording process and print out reports ahead of time to review from before airing those specific episodes weeks after recording finished. Those numbers are then used not only for statistical purposes but also for creating suspenseful TV moments when it seems like viewers actually have an influence on an outcome since their results appear in real time on their screens.