The thousands of lucky Michael Jackson fans on the planet who won a lottery ticket to the King of Pop's funeral were notified via email.
It seems only too fitting for tickets for Michael Jackson's memorial to be handed out in a Willa Wonka-like fasion.
More than 1.6 million MJ fans registered for free tickets to the King of Pop's Tuesday memorial service, and the winners began finding out Sunday afternoon.
"I'm in shock that it has happened," Deka Motanya, 27, of San Francisco told The Associated Press. "It's surreal."
She received an email Sunday afternoon simply saying, "Congratulations, your application was successful."
She responded instantly on Twitter: "OMG OMG OMG OMG i got tickets to the michael jackson memorial service!!!"
Fans had from 10 a.m. Friday to 6 p.m. Saturday to register for a pair of tickets to the service, which will take place at the Staples Center, a sports complex in downtown Los Angeles.
A random draw selected 8,750 names and each person selected will receive two tickets.
Winners will be assigned a unique barcode and instructions for picking up their tickets on Monday. They will receive both a ticket and a wristband, both of which must be displayed to gain entry to the service.
According to Jackson family spokesperson Ken Sunshine, AEG, the company that owns and operates the Staples Center, will "scrub" the entries to remove duplicates and ensure none have been generated by automated systems. This will ensure scalpers don't get their hands on tickets, he said.
Fans not selected in the draw have one other opportunity to attend the memorial. About 6,500 tickets will be given away for the overflow section at the Nokia Theater, which is next door. [SOURCE]
After an overwhelming amount of Michael Jackson fans registered over the weekend for free tickets to the King of Pop's memorial the tickets have been released, and the winning registrants have been notified.
"The Insider" confirms that ticket winners received vouchers from Ticketmaster via e-mail, and were instructed to pick up their tickets Monday June 6 at Dodger Stadium.
Winners were determined by a random drawing of 8,750 of the total number of registrants. Those selected will receive two tickets to the memorial service Tuesday June at either the Staples Center, or the live simulcast at the Nokia Theatre.
1.6 million people signed up for the lottery for tickets to the King of Pop's public memorial service. Registration began on Friday, July 3 at 10 a.m. PT and ended on July 4 at 6 p.m. [source]
The memorial service will be televised with live broadcast coverage.
At 12 days and counting, the length of coverage has already run longer than anyone's idea of a state funeral. Tuesday, the degree of saturation of TV coverage on the death of Michael Jackson reaches the boiling point.
All of the major networks and cable channels will be offering live coverage of the Jackson memorial service starting at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the Staples center in Los Angeles.
NBC had looked as if it would skip live coverage and go only with a one-hour prime-time special Tuesday night. But network executives changed their plans Sunday, and announced that NBC will join ABC and CBS in covering the memorial service live.
Meredith Vieira will anchor NBC's coverage of the memorial service, as well as serving as co-host of Tuesday's Today show from the Staples Center. ABC has Charles Gibson penciled in at the anchor desk in New York for its full court press Tuesday afternoon.
CBS didn't announce live coverage of the memorial service until Monday, but it already had Katie Couric in Los Angeles anchoring the CBS Evening News from the Staples Center. She will be out front on its live memorial broadcast starting at 1.
In addition to Couric's newscast, CBS has also been doing its Early Show out of the Staples Center since Monday. And there is a prime-time Jackson hour planned for Tuesday night with Couric as host. Among the networks, none gets the importance of this story more clearly than CBS.
Expect nonstop coverage on MSNBC, Fox and CNN throughout the day -- unless there is a huge breaking story elsewhere. The 24/7 cable channels were among the first to announce plans to cover the memorial service live.
CNN, which has enjoyed a strong ratings surge for its Jackson programming, lists its coverage as starting at 6 a.m. with Kiran Chetry anchoring American Morning from Los Angeles. The memorial itself will become the focus at noon with Don Lemon continuing to anchor CNN's coverage from Los Angeles. He will be joined there by Soledad O'Brien, Anderson Cooper and Larry King.
Several of CNN's sister channels -- HLN, CNN International and CNN en Espanol -- will also be carrying the memorial live. Robin Meade, A.J. Hammer and Jane Velez-Mitchell will anchor the coverage at HLN (formerly Headline News).
Just as it did for the inauguration of President Barack Obama, CNN will again team up with Facebook Connect so that Internet users can watch CNN coverage online as they update their Facebook status or communicate with friends using the CNN.com live video player. That coverage starts at 8:30 a.m. [source]