I'm wondering about one thing, though... for those countries that vote, ESC has to be transmitted live. Eastern Australia has early morning when the event starts. How are the viewing figures high? On Sunday, it's more believable, but I still doubt so many people would wake up at 6 AM on a Sunday just to watch Eurovision. But the semis which take place on Wednesday and Friday in Australia? Most people need to be at school or work then, no? Could someone [MENTION=11243]ZoboCamel[/MENTION] provide an explanation for this?
Yep, the situation's pretty much what you described - a 5AM or 6AM start on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. TBH I was also worried at first that we might not get enough voters, but it looks like we had enough interested people to allow us the televote, at least this year. Consider that we've got a population of 23 million, which isn't too small compared to a lot of European countries: if you compare us with a European country with 2.3 million people, we'd only need to have a tenth of their viewership rate to have the same amount of live viewers, which seems possible considering our amount of Eurovision fans. Plus, most of the people getting up at 5AM to watch the contest won't just be casual viewers, so I'd imagine we'd send more votes per person than the average viewer, also helping us to cross that threshold of required votes. I know I personally sent around 15 votes in each of the semis & the grand final, and a friend of mine from university mentioned that he sent the full allowed 20 each time.
Certainly it's a pain to try and wake up early in the morning, especially on weekdays, but I was able to do it (and successfully drag my family into doing the same). Luckily enough my classes didn't start too early in the mornings on Wednesdays and Fridays for this year, and the rest of the family was also able to squeeze in the semis before going off to the stuff they had to do (consider that the semis are a lot shorter than the grand final). Getting out of bed isn't entirely pleasant, but it's worth it to finally be able to watch live & vote!
Australia, unlike lets face it Kazakhstan or China, can pretty much guarantee that their votes will closely match an OGAE vote and will vote only for countries the EBU deem worthy of being a possible winner.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Our televotes may be slightly closer to those of the average Eurovision fan, but they still won't 'closely match an OGAE vote' all the time, and whenever it does I don't think it's all that surprising (since the OGAE vote itself generally includes the favourite, popular songs anyway). For a few examples of significant differences, Slovenia was 5th in the OGAE vote and 19th in our televote; Azerbaijan was 9th in OGAE, last in Australian televote; Serbia was 16th in OGAE, 3rd in Australian televote; Latvia was equal last in OGAE, 4th in Australian televote, etc etc. Add on to that the fact that we've got a jury the same as any other country, and it doesn't seem that we're some mystical mirror of OGAE that's been brought in for nefarious purposes - we're just a bunch of fans voting on the contest we like.
Bulgaria said it will make its final decision after JESC wraps up, so there could be a possibility they could be out
To my knowledge Bulgaria was already counted as one of the first 40, and Jon Ola Sand's tweet mentioned that there were 41 countries 'confirmed', right? Bulgaria was being assumed as part of the first 40, so if Australia actually
is a 42nd country, and Bulgaria wasn't part of the original list, we'd still have 40 confirmed (just replacing Bulgaria with Australia) out of a total 42. In this case, there would still be
two countries yet to be announced, which... seems unlikely, given the list of remaining possibilities and what we know of each. Given that, I think either A) Bulgaria may have officially confirmed with the EBU but still be giving mixed messages to the media (ie. they're in but aren't admitting it yet), or B) one of our SBS guys screwed up when phrasing our participation announcement (ie. we're part of the 41), or both.
If one of A) and B) is true, we're sitting at 40/41 (B) or 41/42 (A) known countries, and have one confirmed country still to be announced; if both are true, we know 41/41 countries (a list including Bulgaria and Australia). If neither of these is true - ie. Bulgaria isn't confirmed yet, and we have 41 confirmed countries
other than Australia - then it's even possible that we've got a 43 member list (39 out of 41 confirmed non-Australian countries having been announced, plus Australia as #42, and a possible Bulgaria as #43). So at this point, given that we can't know what's true and what's not, the situation is as follows: we should have between 41 and 43 countries participating next year, Bulgaria may or may not be one of them, and we have between 0 and 2 countries yet to be announced, not including Bulgaria. Of course, there's
also the possibility that both the '41 countries confirmed' and '41 other than Australia' tweets were wrong, which could mean that Australia was #40/41 and the list counted an uncertain Bulgaria, in which case we could even be down to 40, making the real range between 40-43. But... argh, now my head hurts. I guess we can only hope to get as many countries as possible!
Thanks Jon Ola.
