YOU know the feeling. The last of those six balls has just been drawn by Guinevere, Lancelot or Arthur and you haven't won a sausage.

All those hopes and dreams dashed in the few seconds it takes for the numbers to be drawn.

Although the National Lottery's live television draw is a ratings winner, the experience of other countries is that it may not stay that way.

A phenomenon of lottery fatigue, where people simply get bored of the same format week after week, has been witnessed elsewhere.

Part of the problem is that a lottery draw does not translate to television particularly well. Despite a lengthy build up the actual draw lasts only a few seconds.

A televised bingo game has long been seen as the answer to the problem. Its big advantage over a lottery is that as more numbers are drawn the players' chances of winning actually increase. And bingo is a family game universally understood around the world. But there has been a long-standing problem in transferring the live bingo hall atmosphere to the television screen - how do you stop the game when someone has won?

With millions of players sat at home marking their cards and a gap of only six seconds between each ball being drawn it seemed almost impossible for the organisers to check each card by computer.

Europrint's experience in newspapers and television bingo-style games made the Blackburn firm realise the huge potential that existed if the problem could be cracked.

On an East Lancashire Chamber of Commerce visit to Poland the firm, headed by managing director Barry Kilby, was asked to investigate ways of running a television bingo game on a Polish channel.

The firm's staff immediately began looking at designing software that could construct the bingo cards in such a way that they could all be instantly tracked each time a number was drawn.

After many long hours poring over the problem a solution based on complex mathematics was finally found - and one that could be operated with nothing more than a simple PC.

The first television game using the new invention was launched in Estonia in February - already tripling sales and outstripping the other games the State Lottery there run.

Staff from Europrint are currently working on similar game launches in the Czech Republic, Lithuania and New Zealand.

With more than 120 countries and states running their own lotteries, the potential market for the game is huge and new staff have been taken on to cope with demand. Projected revenues from the idea for this year are £1 million, rising to £5 million by the year 2000. It looks like Europrint has hit the jackpot again.

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Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.