Cav's Place

Significant changes to the Eurovision voting system were recently announced and they’re quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, separating televoting and jury scores was something that had to happen ever since it became a rule to have both in each country, and a format that only reveals the winner at the very end and also allows for the illusion that the public makes the difference is obviously good for the show. On the other, however, having the jury scores read individually while the televoting ones are only shown quickly and as totals at the end, with the details only available on-line later, feels completely wrong. And worse is the fact that the juries will continue to score the contestants according to the final rehearsal, so for something other than what the public sees before voting, and therefore said scores read individually will not in any way be based on the evening’s actual performances.

But I got a little ahead of myself and should probably state what the changes are as well. Not that it’s not pretty obvious from the above, but this year countries will no longer offer a single aggregate score, resulting from putting together the jury and televote scores, with the entry that had a better televote score coming out on top in case of ties. Instead, the two scores will remain separate, resulting in the total number of available points doubling, likely more than ten entries receiving points from most countries, and also a smaller chance of any entry finishing with zero points.
Each country’s representative will still present a single score, and actually only the winner will be read out loud, the remaining nine places being only very briefly displayed, for even less time than those outside the top three were displayed so far. However, this single score will be only the result of the jury vote, which will still be given after the last rehearsal and therefore both known to organizers even before the competition and not in any way influenced by or relevant to the actual competition.
The televote result will not be presented as individual scores from each country, though those interested will still be able to check the table on-line after the contest is over. Instead, only the total number of points received by each entry from the televoting process will be read by the host at the end, starting with the entry with the least number of points and ending with the one with the most.
As such, with half the total number of points being presented in the final few minutes and the most important ones, those making the difference at the top, only revealed in the final seconds, the winner won’t be known until the very end. And, since the scores presented at the end are those resulting from the televote, it will appear that the public decides, doing it the other way around giving the impression that the juries would decide in case the winner wouldn’t be the same entry which was leading before these scores were added.

Since I started with the conclusions regarding these changes, I’ll now get to the suggestions I’d have, in order to make it work better. Though I must first once again stress that, until and unless it’ll finally be given based on the evening’s actual performances, the jury vote is, in my view, completely flawed and shouldn’t be included at all. There’s absolutely no excuse for doing it this way, and these changes make it even worse, since what will be presented in detail at the end will be something that will have absolutely nothing to do with the evening’s actual competition.
That said, since the amount of time each country’s representative will need to present only the first place in the jury vote will obviously be less than what was needed to present the top three so far, it may actually be possible to present both the jury vote and the televote from each country, especially if more effort will be put into shortening those awkward greetings as well. Not both at once, I mean, but going through the list of countries once in order to present the jury vote and then doing it again for the televote. This will still result in the winner likely being known well ahead of the end, so it won’t be so good for the show, but it would make the most sense and show the viewers what they should be seeing at the end of the contest, which is how all other viewers voted, in at least the usual amount of detail.
Either way, in order to let people see the entire top ten in such a reduced amount of time, I’d strongly suggest displaying the other places, which won’t be announced out loud, much more prominently than before. At the moment I’m thinking a good idea would be to display fourth to tenth place in a larger font, instead of the classification, for ten seconds, then use five more seconds to fade the classification back into view, move the new points to their places and make any necessary changes in the classification, then display second and third place in an even larger font in some free space on screen, probably below the place where the national representative is shown, for another five seconds, before moving those as well to the classification and making any necessary changes that result from this. After these 20 seconds, which should be the maximum time allowed for greetings and building any tension, the winner, which should also be announced around that moment, will also be placed into the classification. If this total of 20 seconds plus any time needed by the animation for the winner is too much, the display time for places four to ten may be reduced to five seconds, and/or the winner may need to be announced before the second and third place are included into the classification, so the entire top three will be included at once.
Then, while I definitely disagree with it, I can suggest a way to slightly lessen the negative impact of the current idea of only presenting the total televote score of each song, and that’s to at least briefly present the countries each entry received points from. For this purpose, a list should show up somewhere on screen, at the left having the number of points received by the entry in question, from 12 to one and color-coded in a way that makes it immediately obvious where the number of points changes, followed by the flags and two-letter or three-letter codes of the countries which gave said entry that number of points, in alphabetical order. This will of course involve filling the screen with only the classification and this list, with no room left to show the host or anything else, and it’ll still be gone far too quickly to catch much of it, especially for entries that receive points from all or the large majority of countries, but viewers should usually be able to gather some information, such as which countries gave the most points to an entry or what a particular country, possibly their own, gave.

These are only some quick opinions and suggestions, and I may have additional or different ones by the time of the competition, but it’s what I’m thinking at the moment. Immediately after reading the announcement I was also considering briefly displaying a map for each entry, with countries color-coded according to the number of points given to the entry being presented as a result of the televote, but it was soon obvious that it couldn’t be made to work.