Eurovision Song Contest will air live in USA this year

Watch out for flying pigs. Cable channel LOGO just announced that they're going to air the Eurovision Song Contest Final, live and commercial-free, a week from Saturday. 3 PM Eastern, Noon Pacific.

I'm a little bummed that they've announced it so close to the actual broadcast (how much promotion can you do in a week and a half?), and that we seem to be getting it in an off-year (the only other time it aired in America was 1971, and that one was an off-year too), but still excited that at least it's here.

LOGO, BTW, is Viacom's LGBT-interest channel, and the promotion reflects that. Check it out: http://www.newnownext.com/eurovisio...n-the-u-s-for-the-first-time-on-logo/05/2016/
No, Ivan is not going to be singing naked with live wolves on stage, no matter what he says. That's against the rules.

 

So you are going to watch it?

 

>>So you are going to watch it?<<

That's a GOOD question, as it appears that along with this good news comes BAD news ... As part of this deal, they're geoblocking the YouTube feed that has served America so well the last couple years. And I don't have LOGO, and I'm not going to pay the cable company an extra $30 a month to get it (in standard definition).

I'm counting on my trusty VPN to get me around this dilemma. Wish me luck. The EBU may have shot themselves in the foot with this though. LOGO's penetration in the US is under 44%, and I fear they will lose more American viewers online than they will gain from LOGO.

And TBH, I think musically this is the weakest contest in YEARS, possibly decades. The musical variety aspect has just vanished all of a sudden. About 30 of the 42 entries all sound the same to me. After Sweden's graphics-intense win last year, it seems to have turned into the Eurovision Presentation Contest, with the songs being thought of as mere musical accompaniment to whatever snazzy video wall thing they've cooked up. I'm agin' it.

I'm rooting for Austria (a catchy song sung by a cute teenager in French for some reason), but the bookies and fans think she doesn't have a prayer. Because Russia's video wall is REALLY cool ...

 

I was just thinking about this the other day, since I know it typically pops up around this time of year

I don't think I get Logo (never heard of it, but that doesn't mean anything!), but I'll have to check and see if I can figure it out, maybe record it and watch it later. It would be on the 14th, right?

 

The main show is on May 14th.

We are at a birthday party, but maybe we will turn on the TV.

I don't like our contribution this year, but maybe other countries do. Hopefully we will be better than last year, when we came in last.

 

On the 14th, but this deal was so last minute that your cable company may not have it in the schedule yet. Airs at 3 PM Eastern, Noon Pacific. Ran 4 hours last year, quite a bit of which was the voting. It's supposed to be shorter this year thanks to a change in format, but I'll believe it when I see it.

LOGO is Viacom's LGBT-interest channel. "RuPaul's Drag Whatever" is their best known show. I have this sneaky suspicion that the EBU is paying them to air the contest, to try and cut back on the expense of HD streaming to all us Eurovision-deprived Americans. The usual internet feeds on eurovision.tv and YouTube are being geoblocked, but LOGO says the stream will be available for free on their website.

 

The flying pigs have been joined by snowballs in hell. They just announced who's doing the interval act.

Justin Timberlake.

I think "dazed" is the most common reaction among the fans, Americans in particular. I'm sure the folks at LOGO are over the moon.

 

I'm looking forward to the show. I'll be watching the semi final tonight and last night I performed "Rise Like a Phoenix" with my friend who plays the musical saw. Needless to say we brought the house down!!!

 

The only songs I've heard so far are the UK and Australia entries as I like to go in cold. I'm hoping for some surprises later!!!

 

I'm skipping the semi finals, but maybe we will watch the show on Saturday. Austria's contribution is terrible, so I guess we will not make it the the finale. It's cool that "Rise Like a Phoenix" is still known outside of Austria.

 

IMHO, Rise Like a Phoenix is one of the best Eurovision songs ever. It was head and shoulders above the competition that year!!!

 

I also like the song. It could be the title music of a Bond movie. Back then the Austrian Broadcasting Company didn't want to send a song to the Song Contest, but in a last minute decision they decided to send Rise Like a Phoenix. Usually they had some shows on TV in which the audience could vote for their favourite song, but since in recent years our contributions were terrible, they skipped those shows. Last year and this year they brought the shows back and the contributions are terrible again.

 

The UK entries have been poor for the last few years, but I really like the current one. This is the first year in ages that the public have had any input into which song we send. I'm hoping they do well, but I'm also realistic!!!

 

I have no idea about the other countries, so I really don't know any other songs besides ours. I will be cheering for the UK ;-)

 

Good man!!!

 

I just remembered that this was on a little while ago, so I missed the actual song performances, but got to see the spectacular "Love Love Peace Peace" which is pretty much exactly the sort of thing I needed to see. I especially liked the comment about how DJs were new about 30 years so they're perfect for marking a song seem perfect by Eurovision standards

I was also very impressed by the hoverboard choreography by last year's winner. With the weird white dots on his shoulders and the digital effects on the floor, it sounds like they're using the same sort of video mapping technology that was just described in this video for Frozen at the Hyperion in DCA. Disney claims that it's never been used in a live stage performance before, but it looks like Eurovision just beat them to the punch

They're getting the international votes right now. The US voiceovers are cracking me up (it really is like a bad SNL skit!), but I'm surprised that all the countries get 12 votes. I understand that everybody needs a voice, but does San Marino really need the same representation as Germany? I also have no idea how the scoreboard works. Everything keeps moving around and the points on the left seem completely unrelated to the points on the right

 

Ok, I think I eventually figured out the country scoring. Each country got multiple groups of points to distribute, but they only announced the 12 point winner; the others just had them added in. It took me a really long time to catch on!

Were the televotes assigned based on the proportion of the total votes, or was it assigned so that the most popular got a certain number (and so on for each song) regardless of how close the votes were?

I was surprised to see Poland's big jump at the end. After the judge votes they were second to last, but they got the third most popular votes. Obviously it ultimately didn't make much difference overall, but it was a fun comeback!

 

So did you Americans really watch the show? I hope you didn't regret it. We were at a party, so we couldn't watch it, but I've already seen the winnig song and OMG is that one terrible.

 

Hi - thought I'd finally stop in. Sorry for the prolonged absence from my own topic.

Americans in general did not see it. Logo TV is a VERY obscure channel that can be received in less than half of American households, and most of that half doesn't know they have it on their cable service.

The commenting was EXCRUCIATING as far as I was concerned. The commenters were in full obnoxious flamer mode (as one would expect from the RuPaul's Drag Race channel) and probably scared off anyone who wasn't into that sort of thing. They had very little knowledge of what was going on, they CERTAINLY knew nothing of the contestants (other than a couple that Logo had done profiles of because they were "gay interest" - Netherlands and Israel), so they spent nearly all the time critiquing the outfits and making off-color jokes that had nothing to do with anything going on onscreen. I don't believe they even mentioned music more than once or twice in the entire broadcast.

Wait, it gets worse. They committed some serious faux-pas, most stunningly when they declared their dislike for Ukraine's song, because she looked dumpy and she was yelling. They said - I kid you not - that it sounded all dramatic "like the theme to a PIXAR movie". The outraged howls of social media apparently got through to the announcing booth, as they later explained that they "didn't know it had something to do with WWII because it wasn't in English". (Not the best excuse, since most of it was.) But how anyone following the contest in any respect this year could NOT know what that song was about - let alone an announcing team - is beyond me. It's been the biggest story of the Contest for months.

Probably the most entertaining booboo they made was declaring how hot Samra from Azerbaijan was, saying she was bringing "that Kardashian realness" to the Contest. That's right - they compared the Azerbaijani singer to the world's most famous Armenians. (Why this is kind of bad, explained here: Face Off: The Coming War between Armenia and Azerbaijan )

To add injury to insult, all the other usual online sources were geoblocked in the USA. You either watched Logo, or used a VPN to get around the blocks. (Some foreign-language streams, such as SVT Sweden, were available to the intrepid who went off looking for them.)

And to add insult to the injury and the insult, it turned out the EBU didn't bother clearing the American rights to the Justin Timberlake performance, so we didn't get to see him. (They covered it with the interval act from the first Semifinal, the one with the Gray People.) I hear I didn't miss much - that JT made a fool of himself by badly underestimating the production values required to impress a Eurovision crowd. The "Love Love Peace Peace" thing was magnificent, but of course most Americans understood not one single thing about it (including, no doubt, Logo TV's prattling knuckleheads).

So yes, this was a strange Eurovision year here in the states. Personally I'm thrilled with the winning song, because it kept the teeming sea of standard formula pop rubbish - including Russia and Australia - from the top slot. It's way too depressing to listen to on a regular basis, though.

Given the herd mentality that seems to have gripped the Contest over the last few years, I have to wonder if everyone is going to send a song next year about whatever genocides are in their cultures' pasts. Heaven help us if Israel goes down that path.

EDIT: PS - Poland had some pretty major vocal problems at the Jury Final that didn't show up in the broadcast. That's part of the reason for the vast discrepancy in his two scores. The other part is diaspora voting.

 

Although I thought the announcers were a long way from being "great', I'm glad I didn't tune in until the last hour or so, when they were all but useless anyway. I thought their commentary on the vote announcers was kind of fun, but I could see how some of it was very mean spirited; I couldn't have watched the actual performances if the commentary was similar through them.

I was shocked at the end of the broadcast when one of the announcers admitted that it was their first time watching one of these events from beginning to end. If nothing else, that should have been required preparation for 'hosting' it. I was also disappointed after "Love Love Peace Peace" when they commented that the people on stage were previous Eurovision participants (as if we hadn't figured it out ourselves by that point), but then didn't really give us any information about them. I don't fault the announcers for not knowing every detail, but they should have had a basic knowledge of what was going on, and had some sort of script or notes to work off of. When various TV personalities host the Rose Parade, I doubt any of them know a thing about gardening, but they're armed with huge amounts of information so they can make relevant commentary; that seemed to be completely lacking for this. How hard would it have been to print out the Wikipedia page for each performer?

Of what I saw during the encore at the end, I wasn't a big fan of the song that won, but I will attribute that to the post-win excitement that lead to a not-so-great performance, rather than the song itself. It did seem like a departure from the standard Eurovision format, which was nice

I guess I'm glad that the US is finally getting coverage of it, but there's still a lot of improvement to go (not to mention, putting it on a channel that people actually get and watch). At the end I saw a commercial for the Drag Race show on Logo, and if that's the demographic they're going after, I guess I can understand why the commentary was so dreadful. If they can't fix that, I doubt I'll watch in the future