The game concept is nothing new: Provide angle and distance to hit a given target. The new part is that you play live on air on TV and pay 49 Cent per shot. Optionally to keying in the numbers you can use a Symbian application available from some WAP page, which has a graphical user interface and generates the SMS messages automatically for you. Available in different flavors: Astronaut, Katapultti, Bumper Cars,...
RedLynx is the maker of all these games and it seems as if they appeared first on Finnish TV Channels. A week ago I spotted them on the German SuperRTL at 03:00 and it had me stunned for a minute or two. People were actually playing it. Despite the 49 Cents, despite the late hour and despite the worn-out concept the crowd was launching at least two astronauts per second(not counting in the highscore scroll times). Probably not a bad revenue generator, considered that the channel doesn't need a moderator, studio, camera team... just a box running the game and a license from RedLynx.
Did RedLynx really invent this sort of thing or did I miss previous attempts of the entertainment industry? Usually I'd suspect that the States must have had something like this before us Europeans.

By the way, RedLynx also has a really cool non-TV bike trial game in their portfolio, it's programmed in java thus playable in your browser. Check out the (free) Trial Bike and Trial Bike Pro demos over at Miniclip which has loads of other Java and Flash games too.