Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (sometimes informally known as
Millionaire) is an international television
game show franchise of British origin, created by David Briggs, Mike Whitehill and
Steven Knight. In its format, currently owned and licensed by
Sony Pictures Television, large cash prizes are offered for correctly answering a series of multiple-choice questions of increasing (or, in some cases, random) difficulty. The maximum cash prize (in the
original British version) was one million
pounds. Most international versions offer a top prize of one million units of the local currency; the actual value of the prize varies widely, depending on the value of the currency.