esctoday.com are live at the press conference in Athens where ERT are annoucing details of the national final at the Central Athens hotel. The national final will be called Eurovision 2007! So far, ERT have announced that C:Real and Michalis Hatzigiannis could not meet participation deadlines. The final will select the song and singer, voting will be divided between jury and televote and the song will be sung in English. Greece will spend 700,000 Euros and promote the song internationally. None of the participating artists were present at the press conference.

EUROVISION2007
Greece will be calling their national Final 'Eurovision 2007'. Neither Christos Dantis, Tampta or Sarbel were present at the press conference. ERT's executives Mr. George Chouliaras, Fotini Giannoulatos, Johnny Kalimeris and Mr. Andrikakis from ERT Radio were all in attendance.

C:REAL WITHDRAW & Michalis Hatzigiannis could not meet deadlines!
Pop band C:Real have withdrawn from the Greek national final after deciding that they could not meet the deadlines required by ERT. Michalis Hatzigiannis was in the same position, and did not feel he had enough time to prepare a song to the required standard. Both felt that they did not have strong enough songs already to compete with.

3 WAY FINAL, PUBLIC AND JURY TO SELECT SINGER AND SONG
Christos Dantis, Tamta and Sarbel will contest a three-way Greek final will consist of the public and a special jury voting for the greek artist and song. The vote will be split 50% televote, 50% jury. The singers will each select one song to be used in the final in conjunction with ERT.

BUDGET & PROMOTIONAL TOUR
ERT have set a budget of 700,000 Euros and will support the winning artist with a promotional tour across Europe, as they have done in recent years.

SONG PREVIEWS IN 10-15 DAYS
The songs participating in the final will be available to reporters to preview in 10-15 days time. They will then be released to the general public in advance of the final.

GREECE TO SING IN ENGLISH – BUT CALLS FOR LANGUAGE AWARD
ERT confirmed that their song will be performed in English in 2007. They are considering calling on the EBU to introduce an award to recognise countries that sing in their own language to promote the different languages and cultures of the participating countries.

POSSIBLE THIRD YEAR WITH A NON-NATIVE GREEK PERFORMER
Mr Chouliaras, Commissioned Board Member of ERT, answered the reporters' questions concerning the matter of the nationality of Sarbel and Tamta – Sarbel is Greek Cypriot of half Lebanese origin and Tamta is Georgian- with a message. He said that Greece is an open society with immigrants from many countries living within its borders, naturally ERT will give an equal opporunity to the singer no matter what their country of origin.

PRESS CONFERENCE HAS NOW ENDED

No news about the date, venue or hosts has been revealed as yet. We strongly believe that the date will be either February 21st or 28th, but the information will be published here as soon as ERT can confirm it.

Click here to read about the participants.