Eurovision Splits Its Semi-Final in Two and Becomes a Week-Long Event

MAY 15 2008 · 12:30

EBU · 2008 Placement: Institutional · Venue: Belgrade Arena · Host: Belgrade, Serbia · Type: performance innovation · Broadcast: HD For Eurovision 2008 in Belgrade, the EBU introduced a two-semi-final structure, the first time in the contest's history that qualifying rounds were split across two separate televised evenings rather than one. The motivation was arithmetic: post-Cold-War expansion had pushed the participant count past forty, and the single-semi-final model introduced in 2004 was reportedly unable to accommodate the field without unmanageable running times. Under the new format, participants were allocated to one of two semi-finals by a producer-weighted draw, with ten qualifiers from each semi advancing to the Saturday grand final alongside the Big Four and the host country. The two-semi structure turned Eurovision from a single-evening broadcast event into a week-long television production, with the first semi on a Tuesday, the second on a Thursday, and the final on Saturday. Russia's Dima Bilan won the grand final with 'Believe.' The three-evening architecture introduced in Belgrade remains Eurovision's structural skeleton seventeen years later. Context Eurovision's participant-count inflation had been a slow-motion crisis since roughly 1993, when former Yugoslav and Soviet states began joining in numbers. The 2004 introduction of a single semi-final had been a first response; by 2007, with 42 participants, that response was reportedly exhausted. Belgrade was the chosen venue because Serbia had won 2007, the first host city from the former Yugoslavia. Legacy The Belgrade 2008 two-semi-final structure is now so naturalised that modern Eurovision audiences rarely realise it was an innovation. It enabled the contest's participant count to stabilise around forty, created two additional broadcast-commercial opportunities for the EBU each year, and reshaped the Eurovision calendar into the week-long festival format that drives its modern tourism-and-fan-economy business model. Mythology The two-semi-final format is sometimes described as having been introduced in 2004; 2004 introduced the first semi-final at all, and Belgrade 2008 split it into two.