Eurovision

[james_davis_nicoll]

I was looking for this:

Semi-Finals of the 59th Eurovision Song Contest are set to take place on Tuesday 6th and Thursday 8th of May, the Final is scheduled for Saturday, the 10th of May. Some 170 million people from over 40 countries are expected to tune in for the upcoming contest.

But this caught my eye:

Malmö, Sweden -

Hosting this year's Eurovision Song Contest brought in 1,1 billion Swedish Kronor in advertising value to the city of Malmö, the Swedish tourism organisation estimates.

My impression is hosting the Olympics has much the same benefits as agreeing to host an open-air nuclear waste repository or attracting the attention of Ögedei Khan; is Eurovision actually beneficial for the host community?

Comments

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

I believe it depends. I remember hearing that for a while Ireland had won several times in a row and they really didn't want to win because of the expense of it.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

This is true; we won two years in a row and it would have seriously broken our national television station's budget to have to host the thing a third time. There were rumours at the time that the voting was being orchestrated by countries who disliked the amount of structural funding Ireland was getting from the EU at the time; as I understand it, the way that funding was broken down by region meant the really poorly developed bits of Ireland got quite a lot of infrastructure funding even when the country as a whole was doing rather well,

[ext-2042618.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

As Immortalised by Father Ted in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0578517/

[kjn]

As far as I understand it, the costs of the Eurovision circus are primarily carried by the national television company of the organising country, and that cost is far from trivial.

Finland had a cost of 150 million SEK back in 2007, and Moscow 2009 landed at (at least) 285 million SEK; costs apparently continued to escalate. The Swedish competition in Malmö last year apparently brought SVT costs of 125 million SEK - and that was with purposefully going austere by recent standards (for comparison, the entire budget of SVT, the Swedish national television company, was circa 4 billion SEK).

But the income from the events are far more diffuse. Malmö and environs (including Copenhagen) got a huge influx of hotel, restaurant, and tourism money, but it's split up over all sorts of actors.

So it can be a plus event, but only if one keeps it relatively austere, and it's still a huge outlay for the organisers.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Do all you Europeans have "national television companies?"

The U.S. doesn't have anything like the BBC, though federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting System provides about 16% of the funding of "public" broadcasters.

If we were to join the Eurovision Song Contest somehow (akin to the way U.S. physics begged to be allowed to contribute to experiments on CERN's new accelerator), I don't know which network would broadcast it.

The U.S. doesn't have a national airline, either.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

PBS? But I don't think US coverage of the Olympics foreshadows good things for how the US broadcasters would cover Eurovision.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

The Public Broadcasting System (partly funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) is indeed the nearest thing the U.S. has to a national TV network, but it's not very near.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's not even a network, really, in the usual sense. The programming is all produced by individual member stations.

[kjn]

Most European countries have (Greece tried to shut theirs down recently as an "austerity" measure, but as I understand it it was blocked), at least they did when the EBU (who governs the Eurovision brand) was formed.

Nowadays some other privately funded broadcasters are EBU members as well, but then I think they have received special status to cover the entire country (like TV4 in Sweden).

[tuwr.livejournal.com]

Also, note the "...to the city of Malmö". If the full cost of the event is footed by the national TV company and the income goes to the hosting city, it suddenly becomes much easier to make a profit.

[jayblanc.livejournal.com]

Despite despising and refusing to watch the Eurovision Song Contest... Going to have to correct practically everyone who answered above. No, the Host Country does not have to pay for the event all on their own, the event is paid for and organised by the EBU. Participating members pay a participation fee, and on top of that there's the broadcasting fees for anyone who wants to broadcast the event. It's actually relatively cheap television even so.

[brett-dunbar.livejournal.com]

Hosting the Olympics is usually profitable and can produce a lot of good publicity, costs can vary wildly depending on the number of new facilities that need to be built. Los Angeles made the most profit, due partly to entirely using existing venues. London was also relatively cheap as a lot of existing venues could be used (e.g. Wimbledon) and some of the new venues were going to be built anyway (e.g. the aquatic centre replaced an old facility that was at the end of its lifespan and due for replacement).

Quite how Montreal managed to lose so much money is a bit of a mystery, and isn't typical. Calgary and Vancouver were much better run.

Beijing had the highest spending of any summer games and apart from the main stadium already had uses for the facilities, for example several of the city's universities got new gyms. The main stadium although lacking a permanent tenant has been reasonably busy with a variety of one off events.

Sochi is, per event, by far the most expensive games ever and may lose rather a lot of money.