Tonight is the big night for Belgium, Hasselt, host broadcasters VRT and RTBF, the European Broadcasting Union and, above all, the 16 participants of this year's Junior Eurovision Song Contest! With less than 12 hours to go before millions of European people will tune in to the largest song contest for children in the world, esctoday.com is in place again to bring you live coverage throughout the day!

Antonio from Spain got wat he asked for; snow! During yesterday's dress rehearsal he revealed he never saw snow in real, now there is plenty of it outside! Although the weather conditions are not the best to prepare for a song contest, everyone seems to be confident tonight's event will be a success.

It's still quiet at the press centre. Only eight people decided to start working early, among them one of the editors of the official website junioreurovision.tv. “We are going to cover the final both in written as well as with photos”, she told us. As soon as televoting company Digame releases the official televoting results, they can be found on the official website as well. The official site so far attracted visitors from 111 countries, among them Benin, Ghana and Ivory Cost. Most visitors come from Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. Poland (8) and France (9), countries that don't even participate, are among the top 10, just like the United States (10).

Belgian newspapers are enthousiastic about tonight's show. “80 million people will tonight…”, another people predicts 160 million viewers to tune in. Previous years, approximately 40 million people saw the show. Broadcasters like Russian RTR and the international channel of Spanish TVE have an enormous reach and therefor can increase the ratings enormously. Journalists give Romania, Spain and Latvia high chances of winning. Newspapers predict Belgian representative Lindsay to end somewhere between the 8th and 10th position. However, they all agree the vocal quality is absoltely high and that this is by far the largest television event Belgium has ever organised.

Good luck, bonne chance, veel succes!