Eurovision 2019

Interesting that France 4 took the feed with heavier sponsorship and product placement. The UK, Norway, Denmark and Sweden I've checked and they had a sponsorship-free feed (rather than masking sponsored elements) I believe Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Israel may also have had a sponsorship-free feed.

(Denmark took a sponsor-free feed, but ran a pre-show MyHeritage sponsor bumper, as I guess in Denmark out-of-show sponsorship is allowed, as it is in Sweden and Norway for international shows I believe. Melodifestivalen's final is 'international' as they make it available free-of-charge to the Baltic states I believe...)





France 4 also don't seem to have used the host broadcaster style for any of their additional graphics.



They did - however - manage to remain on-air until the contest had finished.

Closet since Semi 1 of 2014 where San Marino qualified by 1 point over Portugal. May well have been San Marino in 10th last night.

The final few minutes are up on iPlayer now.

And of course, no acknowledgement of the break in transmission. I mean, it was the last few minutes so it wasn't like you missed anything. But that's surprising none of the producers actually told one of them that BBC Four lost the feed.

Although I *think* the commentary cuts out where it went dead and we only hear from them again once they quit the main feed?

Oh there are actually MyHeritage-less feeds? This sounds excellent… And indeed very surprising that the sponsored feed was chosen by France•tv, in hindsight.

I also heard from someone in France that they wanted the BBC feed instead of France TV because they found the commentators to be homophobic.

The normal rule in live TV is to carry on as if you are on-air (so you have a clean recording - and because in many cases you may still be on-air via some routes - particularly on BBC One and ITV where there are multiple Playout areas and routes) and only apologise if you definitely make it back to live transmission. As that didn't happen on BBC Four last night there was no point at which it made sense to apologise.

Same when the Last Leg got cut off a few years ago, they just carried on as normal during the break (and the footage from the time they were cut off did turn up on 4OD and repeats of the show anyway).

Because the USA is now without an official broadcaster again thanks to Viacom dropping it from Logo. We had to use the Swedish SVT upload of Semi Final 1 so I could watch with my US based partner.

There's apparently been talks with Netflix to get US rights, as they are making a mockumentary Eurovision film with Will Ferrell sometime next year. So maybe the rights are in temp limbo because of Viacom optioning out in April. But was kind of a bummer they didn't un-geoblock the youtube stream for the US after Viacom flaked out. They trotted out some excuse about how Youtube pays artists badly, but it's a little weird when the youtube live stream is fine almost everywhere else. Ho hum

I hope Netflix treats it better than Logo did however. They had the worst commentators for their first year, and then second year they only took the final as I recall.

In any case, Sweden's feed lacked advertising stuff and they don't do any personally recorded skits. About the most dabbing SVT did besides commentary was put up an official caption overlay to remind everyone they couldn't vote in SF1

I will say for the BBC - that Scott and Rylan are probably the best match up for the Semi Finals since the move to BBC Three/Four - also the skits & interviews were a bit better than previous years.

No mention on here about the plans for an American Song Contest starting in 2021 then?

http://esc2usa.com/

(link posted on this year's Eurovision Diary)

Today is Thursday 16 May 2019. The Eurovision Song Contest 2019 Second Semi-Final takes place at the Expo Tel Aviv (International Convention Center), Tel Aviv, Israel tonight, starting at 20:00 BST. The 18 countries taking part tonight, in order of appearance, will be:

Armenia, Ireland, Moldova, Switzerland, Latvia, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Croatia, Malta, Lithuania, Russia, Albania, Norway, The Netherlands, North Macedonia, Azerbaijan.

Each of those countries will be able to vote in tonight's semi-final. Three of the six direct finalists Germany, Italy and United Kingdom will also be able to vote in tonight's semi-final.

The ten highest placed countries, by a combination of jury voting and televoting, will proceed to Saturday night's Grand Final. Those ten qualifying countries will be announced in a random order just before the end of tonight's semi-final; the actual results of all 18 countries will only be revealed to the public after Saturday night's Grand Final is all over. Anyway good luck to tonight's 18 semi-finalists, may the best ten qualify to Saturday night's Grand Final.