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The Eurovision Song Contest will get an official brother. The EBU has teamed up with the Australian public broadcaster SBS announced an Asian variant.

The SBS will work with production partner Blink TV next year to the first edition. Very soon start the first conversations with other broadcasters. It will be a broadcast live final with maximum twenty participating countries from Asia Pacific and a range of up to a billion viewers, according to the EBU. An exact date and a rules of procedure are not there yet.

Afterwards, will be other guest locations searched in the same region, for the next editions. The broadcasting rights will be sold globally, which means that, for example, the VRT and the NIS will be able to broadcast the game.

Dr. Frank-Dieter Freiling, the German President of the Reference Group of the Eurovision song contest, he lets you know that it’s great that the draw of the song contest to in Asia reaches out: ‘ SBS Australia broadcasts the Eurovision Song Contest for over thirty years, and therefore we find them the perfect partner to an Alliance of other broadcasters to build with it. Asian composers and artists get Similarly the chance to on a Eurovision stage to act. ‘

The ABU

It is striking that the EBU this is fishing in the pond of the ABU, the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union. Who organizes annually since 2012 the ABU TV Song Festival, even though based on the Eurovision Song Contest. A big difference is that there is no competitive element is: it’s just a presentation of songs from different countries. The Fifth Edition is scheduled in October this year in the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

What this new ‘ Asian songcontest ‘ as a result will have on the future of Australia on the ‘ European song festival ‘, is still a mystery. It is already certain that singer Dani Im down under will represent in the second semifinal in Stockholm, but a long future for the country on ‘ our ‘ song festival now seems much less likely.