I know the juries vote the day before but are they in the arena or are they linked to in their respective countries. If they're all flown out that's 210 people they're accommodating the show could do without.
All ESC broadcasters take part in a rehearsal of the contest on Friday night. The juries are able to watch this rehearsal in their own country - they don't have to be in the arena.
The rehearsal also includes a rehearsal of the spokesperson voting (with dummy results) and a recording is made of the show, up until the voting, to run as a backup in every country in case of technical issues.
I think the implication is, he's Russian so will have some added support from the rest of the Eastern bloc. He actually hasn't done a lot of travelling across the region though, and isn't well known in each country as some previous Russian/Eastern Bloc entrants.
Yes - if you are a known Russian speaker, then you may pick up votes from other ex-Soviet countries (even the Baltic states as they have very large Russian-speaking communities who identify more with 'Mother Russia' than their more Western-facing countrymen and countrywomen.) However this is often based on appearances on MTV Russia etc - so if the Bulgarian entry isn't well known and obviously 'Russian' it may not count as much.
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The song/performer is very good anyway, so there wouldn't be much of a scandal if he won.
No. He'd be the first winner born this century if he did.
I decided to give it a whirl with this free NOW TV box, only to find it's even more useless than I originally thought. I cannot connect it to my network, as it's searching for a DHCP server that basically does not exist. All my network devices are setup with manually allocated IP addresses. This NOWTV box does not have that option.
Therefore, it's unusable. It's effectively a brick. I might as well stick the useless piece of crap on eBay for a fiver!
Ah - that's annoying. However, to be fair, most home users will be running DHCP, and those of us who run with static IP addresses will usually have either a MAC-address based DHCP server to cope in this situation, or will run a separate VLAN for devices that need it (which is my preferred solution these days)
Arguably an even better position for Bulgaria though. And he's Russian by birth. Just saying.
Though Russia aren't in the contest this year, I guess there is always a whiff of phone vote manipulation (particularly in smaller countries where fewer votes would make a bigger difference)
As Mel handed back to the stage for the interval act, it had already started behind her by at least 20 seconds but then they cut to the start. Are the links filmed during the rehearsals or have the BBC got the stream on a time delay? I don't really understand how they managed it.
The BBC in London (who handle the opt-outs) would easily be able to time delay and turnaround the incoming feed from Kiev to allow them to cleanly hit items they want to show but avoid showing things they don't when they are taking the ad breaks (and on the non-voting semi final they traditionally leave after the first recap to avoid showing the songs you can't vote for multiple times)
The advertising breaks in the show are guaranteed to be a fixed duration so with some clever timing you can get back to the live show cleanly at the end of an ad break, even if you leave before the start of one. (The interval act and proposal were in the ad break, the Big Five chat was after it)
When you see the full screen 'Celebrate Diversity' graphics they signify the start or end of an ad break.
Last edited by noggin on 12 May 2017 1:47am - 2 times in total
Particularly amused at the grumbles that Latvia that year only won because "the Baltics all voted for each other". That'll be three countries, then...
Neighbourly voting helps keep countries off the bottom of the board, but not to win.
Yes - you don't win through neighbourhood voting (which isn't political - it's just a shared musical scene in many cases) - but it does help you avoid being at the very bottom. You only win if you get decent votes consistently from everyone.
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It's interesting to note that we generally give high points to the winning entry so we can't bemoan its success. We even gave 12 points to Lordi.
Yes - though the jury vs televote split in the UK is often hilarious.
One thing that really stuck out for me was how hardly any songs had any staging gimmicks this year. In recent years we've had trampolines, giant hamster wheels, see saws, projecting blocks from walls etc. Last night: five treadmills, a piano on fire and a guy up a stepladder wearing a horses head (of course). Everything else was just singers singing. (I expect I've forgotten something else but you get my point)
I think the cost and practicality of getting elaborate props couriered to Ukraine, and the difficulty of building locally, probably meant many countries kept props to a minimum.
The Prime Minister is on the show today and there's been some amendments to the set because of this.
I can see that there is no view outside so presumably the blinds have been pulled down, and some extra screens have been placed in the middle to cover up the blinds.
Less amendments - more a re-arrangement of existing elements. Not the first time they've done this. When Ellen Degeneres was on they rearranged the portrait screens in a similar manner. (Those screens are normally in the performance area at the other end of the studio - but are used for sofa items quite often too)
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I presume this is to prevent any paparazzi from photographing through the window or to prevent any security incidents.
I suspect security, and to avoid any visible banner or placard waving through a window?
I'm sure I'd seen a clip from DP earlier in the week which showed the big desk in place, so it was unsurprising to see it at 9am this morning . . . albeit with some different masking to hide the cameras, which is spoilt by that misaligned 'screen'
http://i66.tinypic.com/jtut77.jpg
Ugh. We know its a studio. We know there are cameras in it.
Don't go to the bother of trying to hide them to the audience, just show us the bloody cameras.
Nobody minds, nobody cares.
Yep - but a floating virtual screen (that big screen isn't there either) would look very odd without some kind of surround. It's a pity they didn't get a shot of the newsroom from quite the right angle for a slung high wide, but I don't mind it otherwise.
I don't think Sky News will plummet to the depths of pure political bias as their sister network FOX News. I mean FOX news anchors need to have their tongues dry cleaned after all the ass licking of Donald Trump they do in any given day.
Can you imagine how bad Sky News would be if they used the same tactics and ass kissing as Fox News here in the UK. They would be out of business very soon.
I am used to US cable news channels, and watching them makes me glad we have just two BBC and Sky. Both have their bias and flaws but when it comes to the US, we are much better off.
Well there is a big difference between the US and the UK. Here news broadcasts legally have to be impartial. There is no such requirement in the US.
Mind you it probably didn't help that widescreen TVs were available before widescreen broadcasts (and indeed home movies/videos in widescreen) were the norm and TVs were set up in showrooms and what not as stretchyvision. I'm sure Bullseye gave away widescreen TVs at one point in the 1990s.
Yep - first 16:9 CRTs appeared in the early 90s. I remember a Ferguson/Thomson model appeared long before there were any 16:9 full-height sources (apart from European D/D2-Mac movies and possibly the odd anamorphic laserdisk). I don't think it even had a PALPlus decoder (not that it would have been much use). I guess it was really aimed at people watching VHS tapes of letterboxed movies, or on mainland Europe the letterboxed movie broadcasts (We were still much more pan-and-scan here at the time). I think some dev funding came from the EU Widescreen project and/or Eureka 1250 (even though it was SD)
By the mid-90s Sony had launched some - including a very cute 16"(?) set that was designed for the Playstation, but used in lots of early 16:9 studios as a cheap floor monitor (the alternatives were all 4:3 scan-crushed monitors displaying a letterbox, but full res, image)
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In an ideal world we'd pillarbox everything, which is what happens on the HD channels and what Challenge were doing two months ago. Some people will never be happy though and for those I think it might be easier just to take their TVs off them.
To be honest, I'd be happy with full-width / full-height 4:3 SD broadcasts IF it is correctly flagged as 4:3 in the MPEG2 header (which is how the BBC, ITV etc. handle things). (Assuming the broadcasters don't pillarbox internally, this would avoid a horizontal resolution loss from 702 to 540ish)
However I WISH Sky would offer a pillarbox option (as most other receivers do) in their display set-ups, so that we could set our boxes to output 1080i instead of Automatic to get proper shaped picture, and avoid the re-sync delay when switching between SD and HD channels... (If you leave your box in 1080i mode all 4:3 SD stuff is upscaled to 16:9 HD via a stretch, rather than a pillarbox...)
