Eurovision 2016

I think the thing about MF is that it isn't really that much to do with Eurovision. It's become its own thing, kind of almost divorced from Eurovision. They hardly even mention the Eurovision song contest during the shows, and the positively insane levels of tabloid coverage are not about Eurovision, they are all about Melodifestivalen.

Sure - representing Sweden is the prize - but it's as much about MF as it was about the ESC. You'd be hard pressed to know that it was an NF if you watched it cold.

And if you look at the rest of the SVT, TV3 and TV4 schedules you can see why MF does so well in the ratings.

Actually, reading the ESC twitter feed someone has come up with a great idea as to what the 'announcement' could be.
Lifting the 15 min window on voting, to as soon as that performance starts..

They've done that before (though still with the voting window) and scrapped it a few years ago. The voting graphics were very distracting during the performance.

All is revealed... the jury and televoters points will BOTH be awarded, separately...

http://www.eurovision.tv/page/news?id=biggest_change_to_eurovision_song_contest_voting_since_1975

...however the televoters results will be combined, and revealed by the host in reverse order. The upshot is the winner will only be known at the very end, removing the scenario where it's mathematically impossible for any other country to win with 5-6 votes left to come in.

Hmmm.. viciously underwhelmed

So, realization from the EBU that 'dynamic marks awarding' didn't really work.

Don't see how this stops you knowing the winner until the last marks awards though?

Surley, if 20 out of the 40 juries gave 12 points to say, Norway in a row, no amount of result order switching or manipulation could hide the winner - or am I missing something here?

The televote is combined. So the spokespersons will announce the jury scores from each individual country first. After that, Petra and Mans will deliver the result of the public vote which will be combined. It's similar to the system used at Melfest and another interesting idea borrowed, to a degree, from X Factor.

To answer your edit - because even then it will not be over until the, er, Swedish lady has sung.

I like this idea, but the biggest question remains in how they would be able to not run over after midnight.....

I'm really not liking this idea. It removes the 'how has a country voted?' fun from the voting. Casual viewers will only know how their countries' juries have voted and will have no idea how their televotes counted. It means that the entire contest can be massively altered in the final stage with no warning. It makes the in-vision voting far less exciting - we will have 43 spokespeople reporting the votes of 5 people in their country (so will spend an hour or so reporting the jury only).

Not at all convinced this is a good idea. The voting is the ratings winning aspect of the contest in the UK - can't see this will improve on that, as the massive jeopardy is at the end.

The one plus point is that it will demonstrate the difference between juries and phone voting across Europe I guess - but not allowing the casual audience to have a clue how THEY voted country-by-country feels like a really odd choice. I'd argue reporting the juries as a lump first and THEN doing public voting country by country would be a better solution. It makes the juries appear FAR more important than the viewers, though it does give the combined viewers across Europe the final say.

I guess the one thing it avoids is knowing the result before the end of the phone voting - which has increasingly been a problem in the two-semifinal format.

Interestingly it means that the spokespeople will know their votes on Friday night (as they will only be reporting the results of the Friday evening jury dress rehearsal)

They're taking the same format as the MF final. Jury votes reported separately, but all the televotes lumped together and awarded at the end as a single lump.

So they will presumably award from lowest to highest in televote terms at the end of the jury votes, starting with countries that didn't receive a single point in televotes, ending with those who have been awarded the most.

So the juries will award 43 x 1-7,8,10,12 marks in-vision via a spokesperson (i.e. a total of 58 each).

There will be a total of 43 x 58 (which is 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+10+12) = 2494 televote votes to distribute, with a maximum possible televote total of 504 (42 x 12) to any given country (i.e. equivalent of all other countries giving it 12), and a minimum of 0.

The televotes will be totalled up by recipient country and reported as a single pan-European vote, recipient country by recipient country in increasing vote order I suspect. So we could get the situation where France gets 0 from the televotes, Sweden gets 504 from the televotes etc. (The situation still preserves the equality of each countries' votes - so isn't prorata based on pan-European votes added together, it is still country-by-country with each country having 58 points each to award)

This will mean the leaderboard can be turned upside down in the final stage if the juries and phone votes contradict each other across Europe.

I guess the only difference between this and the MF final is that the televotes will be regionalised in their awarding if not their reporting.

In comparison to previous years it does mean that the entire viewer votes count, and aren't counteracted in the same way by the juries, as the two votes are reported separately and not combined and then ranked country-by-country.

(The above maths based on 43 countries and not being able to vote for yourself!)

I'd present the votes the other way around. Juries lumped together at the start, then phone votes presented one-by-one by the spokespersons. Yes, you might know who's won early on, but the whole fun of the voting is the guessing what people have voted for, and seeing the competitors realising they've won halfway through a vote.

Sounds good. Should work well.

That was my reaction too, but I can see why they've done it this way. It keeps the suspense until the very few votes, and allows the table to massively turned. It also totally separates jury from televotes, which has been a complaint of recent years. (The UK jury could totally nullify the UK televote previously - now they will be reported, and effectively vote, separately)