VentureBeat

The borders between media are porous. WorldWinner, an online skill-based game company, proved that today when it announced that its “CATCH 21″ game will become a TV show on the GSN channel shown in 68 million homes.

GSN airs only game shows and is jointly owned by Sony and Liberty Media, which bought WorldWinner’s parent company last year. The show will be broadcast on weekdays starting Monday July 21 at 7:30pm Eastern time. The series is expected to go for at least 40 episodes.

“We thought this would be a great way to make TV viewers into contestants and game players into TV watchers,” said Peter Blacklow, president of WorldWinner (pictured below).

The TV version of CATCH 21 was created by Merrill Heatter, who has created game shows such as “The Hollywood Squares,” and Scott Sternberg, whose credits include “The Gong Show.” Actor Alfonso Ribeiro will the game show host. The game is a variant of BlackJack where three contestants compete by speeding through a deck of cards to get as many “21″ hands within a time limit. They can make their opponents weaker by passing them bad cards.

The game debuted in 2000 as one of WorldWinner’s original skill-based online games. In such games, players compete against each other for prizes or in tournaments. Since the games involve skill, and not chance as in gambling, the prize-based gaming is considered legal. The game still draws considerable traffic in the hundreds of thousands and is available on GSN.com, where players can download it and play along with the show, competing for cash and prizes. CATCH 21 also available on mobile phones through Cellufun and on AOL’s Games.com site.

With cross-media promotion, WorldWinner is going to be tough to beat.  That’s why I said last week that German challenger GameDuell may have a hard time coming into the U.S. market to compete with Worldwinner and its other rival, King.com.

German skill-games site GameDuell has raised $17 million in a second round of funding from Wellington Partners.

The Berlin-based company has more than 10 million registered members and claims to be the No. 1 game community in Germany. It plans to use the money for an international expansion, including a move into the U.S. which is already under way.

Kai Bolik, chief executive, said in a statement that results in France and Spain show that the company’s marketing strategy is working.

GameDuell creates skill-based online games, which include solitaire, Mahjong, Sudoku, pool and darts. Players can log into the site and play against real players for prizes. But since the games involve skill and not luck, they aren’t considered gambling. Thus, they aren’t restricted in many territories. The site says more than 200,000 games are played each day.

But the market is competitive, since the games are simple and they’re not so hard to clone. Of GameDuell’s competitors, the toughest is WorldWinner, which has the backing of Liberty Media’s TV properties to push users to its site. In the U.S., WorldWinner has been around since 2000. In 2006, it was acquired by FUN Technologies, the owner of SkillJam, for $23 million, and media giant LibertyMedia bought WorldWinner in December.

WorldWinner says it has tens of millions of registered players. It has 100 employees, mostly in Newton, Mass. Peter Blacklow, president of WorldWinner, said on a panel in May that gamers typically spend $400 a month playing the company’s contests. WorldWinner’s commission is 15 percent to 20 percent of that.

GameDuell said it has more than 200 media partners and is Germany’s third-largest online advertiser. It has 80 employees and plans to double its workforce in the coming months. Founded in 2003, the company is run by Bolik and fellow internet entrepreneurs Michael Kalkowski and Boris Wasmuth.

GameDuell received a first round of funding from Holtzbrinck Ventures and Burda Digital Ventures in 2004. Wellington just added LinkedIn cofounder Eric Ly as a partner.