A critical announcement came in during the broadcast of today’s evening news report of IBA: the broadcaster will end its broadcast within an hour. After 49 years, Israel’s Broadcasting Authority (IBA) is officially shut down.

Starting today (Wednesday), a slide will be presented on IBA’s two channels (1 and 33) and the radio broadcasts of IBA will include music only.

A total of 20 workers will remain on set in order to provide a smooth broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest feed from Kyiv. As Israel has no commentator, the broadcast is accompanied by subtitles added on in Jerusalem. IBA’s radio station 88FM will broadcast the contest as well with live commentary by Kobi Menora, Dori Ben Ze’ev and Alon Amir.

Two of IBA’s broadcasting breakthroughs belong to the Eurovision Song Contest, with the first colour broadcast being Eurovision 1979 and the first HD broadcast being Semifinal 1 of Eurovision 2010 (in preparations for the FIFA World Cup that was held later that year).

Our broadcasts are over: the last twenty minutes of IBA on air

The new broadcaster, IPBC (Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation), or Kan (Here) as it is called in Hebrew, is set to begin broadcasting on 15 May, after producing online content for a while, mainly on Facebook. Having no active news department, which is a requirement for an EBU membership, they would not be able to join the union immediately. However, as soon as joining the EBU, they will get all the rights to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest. They are already supporting and promoting IMRI for this year’s contest in their online channels.

Despite starting to run auditions for Rising Star for Eurovision 2018, produced by Keshet and Teddy Productions on Channel 2, it will be up to IPBC to decide whether they would like to use this mechanism for choosing the Israeli representative or to have a different system for 2018.

Stay tuned to ESCToday for more news regarding Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest.