The second semifinal of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest was scheduled by the Spanish broadcaster TVE to be aired on its second channel TVE2 at 21:00 CET. Nevertheless, the public corporation is not airing the event live. Instead, a tennis match is being shown.
The European Broadcasting Union rules state clearly that every participant broadcaster should broadcast at least the semifinal where they are taking part. In the case of Spain, that would be the second semifinal, where the country has its voting rights after moving them from Tuesday. As previously reported, TVE asked EBU for a semifinal change due to the broadcast two days ago of the most important political debate of the year.
UPDATE. TVE has started airing the second semifinal, in a recorded format, shortly after 22:00 CET, with a delay of 1 hour. The Spanish broadcaster claimed "technical difficulties" to do the live broadcast, and therefore the televote was deactivated. Spanish results for tonight's semifinal have been produced by the back-up jury.
Stay tuned to esctoday.com for further development on this story.
