Eurovision 2014 - 06/08/10 May 2014

It was important to pay tribute to ABBA this year, because it is the 40th anniversary of Waterloo.

It seems that SVT timed it wrong, if they were to mark the anniversary in a bigger way, they should have won last year, but they were not going to with that song (You).

Terry was only off tube once (and not exactly in recent years) - Gothenburg 1985.

That's because Terry actually did his commentary from London, he had the flu which prevented him from travelling to Gothenburg.

What was wrong with the 2011 telecast?

He'd have had trouble doing the commentary from London if he was not doing it off tube.

There was a massive failure in Düsseldorf during the first semi-final that meant on-site commentary feeds disappeared.

Some commentators were able to ring back to their home countries on their mobile phones etc. but because Scott was in London, only Sara Cox (I think it was Sara on location that year) disappeared, and because the BBC also had their camera feed, she was able to rejoin via that circuit ISTR.

Yes - I had a nagging feeling I remembered that at least once the main commentary was off-tube but couldn't quite remember. (But I knew "recent years" would cover me!)

And for those who aren't sure what "off-tube" means - it's the term used to describe commentary added away from the event, where the commentator is only able to see the TV coverage of the event so is watching "off tube" (where "tube" is short for "cathode ray tube" which is what TV screens used to be)

I had no idea that was where the phrase came from, but that last bit in brackets makes me feel very old!

ISTR that the contingency plans for the presentation areas moving from their bit of TVC to the Post Production centre in Stage V (as opposed to the full evacuation to Pebble Mill) used OTCA1 and 2 for the continuity booths for BBC 1 and 2 respectively... Off-tube commentary was clearly very common at one point for Post Production to specifically build a couple of booths for such operations. I assume this was generally for sport coverage ...?

Indeed !!!

Of course there's 'You Tube' from similar derivation !

Interesting to see the EBU release this voting video today ......



Quick slate at the end covering the exclusion of the App and SMS voting in some Countries.

Nice explanation - and those crucial extra two words of votes being "submitted and received " just highlights how stupid the UK companies were to ditch SMS voting when they did (though the short code calling is IMO now a better option anyway).

Not sure I follow.

The issue in the UK was that there was no way of knowing that your SMS would ever be received by the close of voting. Tweaking the Ts and Cs so that you are better legally covered (presumably to avoid refund claims) in this eventually doesn't solve the problem that people vote (and indeed pay to vote) and their vote doesn't count? It covers the contest but doesn't actually fix the underlying problem that votes can potentially be cast, but not counted, does it?

With a phone call, you have a much better idea that your vote will have been received if you reach a recorded "Thank you for voting" message rather than getting an engaged tone.

I've still not seen any proper analysis of how reliable SMS vote tabulation is across the Eurovision nations, so really don't know whether the situation there is the same as it was in the UK, whether the relative volumes of voting SMSs to normal SMSs is different to the UK, whether all countries use the same system as the UK did to avoid crashing the text message network etc.