Eurovision 2015 - 60th Anniversary Edition

Could you imagine the contest being done in a TV studio now?!

Yes I could imagine it.

If it's in a studio of the size of Fountain TV's it would still get a good atmosphere, just not what we've become accustomed to with Eurovision these days.

Yes but what's the audience size Fountain can handle? 300 maybe? Even the Eurovision's Greatest Hits concert the BBC recently organised was small by recent standards as having an audience of 4,000 (although that was roughly the same audience size as the last BBC contest in Birmingham ISTR)

Apparently the audience capacity is up to 1000.

That was a particularly infamous contest where one of the juries changed their votes at the last minute and Denmatk came through and won. I've read it said before that whilst people always cry foul at the voting in Eurovision this is the only concrete example of foul play at work. It was also notable that whilst the juries were meant to be in their home countries when Katie Boyle spoke with them during the voting they sounded crystal clear......almost as if they were in the next studio!

I wondered about those contributions, and several others over the years where the quality has been more like a radio or isdn link. When did isdn come into regular use? Could they have been Eurovision radio circuits? (Or what The BBC call music circuits, to distinguish their quality from isdn which sound very middle-y)

Conflicting sources, but ISDN seems to have come about in the late 80s. Which makes sense, somebody posted a video in the Websites forum of a full Eurovision from 1984 with Wogan commentating via a phone line.

Yep - ISDN was an 80s development. Prior to this either normal subscriber phone lines, or voice-quality 'voice circuits' (effectively phone quality but routed differently to a normal phone call) were used for commentary, and 'music' circuits were used for programme contribution. The quality of 'music' circuits could be quite variable - and they weren't universally available (they normally relied on the local PTT provider - like the Post Office in the UK - to provide them as they were often a monopoly)

I don't know what the EBU had in place for high quality radio distribution through Europe in the 60s and 70s - if anything. It may be that they had to deal with the local PTTs.

ISDN is still provided by the EBU for commentary and 4-wire talkback at the Eurovision song contest, though many broadcasters will now also be using IP circuits for higher quality audio.

Digital technology was unlikely to have been in use in the early 60s for the ESC voting (many broadcasters will still very basic in facilities terms back then so even handling a phone call was not straightforward) - but it might surprise some to know that BBC Radio was distributed to transmitters digitally, first using PCM then using NICAM, starting in about 1972.

(The BBC also ended up developing SIS (Sound in Syncs) because getting high quality music circuits to carry TV sound, which had to come from the GPO if they were temporary usually, wasn't always that easy - so you'd get OK pictures but lousy sound. You couldn't use a subcarrier on the vision circuit (as was used for broadcast) because the bandwidth needed wasn't available, so instead the BBC digitised the programme sound and inserted it digitally into the sync pulses of the analogue video signal. This was developed in the late 60s, and the EBU adopted it from the mid-70s I believe. (Any analogue sat-hunters who looked at feeds in the 90s will remember the EBU stuff not being easy to lock because of this - as the TV couldn't 'see' the sync pulses) Off topic I know...)

Off topic for sure, but brilliant. Would love to see a broadcast technology thread with stuff like that in if anybody wants to start one?

Here is Electro Velvet's performance from Eurovision's Greatest Hits. Being there it received a good reception from the audience. However it probably was a missed opportunity to perfect the stage performance for Vienna as it was basically a recreation of the video.

I've always been curious about how it works. Do the broadcasters effectively opt into a satellite feed at 19:00 UTC and then superimpose "nation-specific" astons, such as those with the phone numbers on the feed locally? And that feed is then mixed in with the feed of the commentator?