The actual media centre in Malmö has opened today and the first event was the presss conference held by the organisers.
Representatives from the European Broadcasting Union EBU, Swedish Television SVT, City of Malmö represented their ideas for the members of the media. See photos from the press conference on SVT.se here
The new Eurovision Song Contest phone application was presented and it can be used even to vote during the semi-finals and the final.
We were treated to details of the forthcoming Eurovision show, one of the postcards showing the artists at their homes and some of the comedy of the host Petra Mede.
We also heard how the City of Malmö is proud of hosting the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, and is making the contest sustainable, by for example serving tap water instead of bottled water.
Esctoday.com asked a question of the new arrangement with the closed rehearsals, and the event executive Sietse Bakker of EBU replied.
He says the Reference group of the Eurovision Song Contest decided to keep the rehearsals closed to give the artists more time to get used to the big stage without the extra stress of members of the media being present and posting all their mistakes online.
As for why the proper media centre was not open from day one there was really no clear answer, but Mr Bakker said there would always be teething problems when something was done for the first time, but that there was always room for improvement.
There was also a question of the new phone app that can be used to vote in the Eurovision Song Contest shows.
The app must be connected to your PayPal account and your credit card and the votes will be counted in that country. It became not clear how much the cost to vote is per vote and whether there is a limit to the votes cast by one user.
There were also a few questions about the running order and how it is decided, but no clear answers were actually provided other than that only the executive supervisor will know the result of the semi-finals when the running order for the final is decided and that it should not have any effect on the decision as the best song will win anyway.
We also heard that the EBU is working to get the absent countries back for the following years.
The contests are being broadcast live to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Portugal, despite them not taking part as well as Australia.
We also heard that the Chinese EBU associate member CCTV has bought the rights to show the contests from 2009 to this year’s one and will test how the Chinese audiences will take to the shows.
We heard also that the EBU has set provisional dates for the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest, which will yet need to be confirmed with the future host broadcaster, and these dates are 13, 15 and 17 May 2014.
Watch the press conference on SVT Play here
