Why? Because you should have ignored it altogether, or you thought the result of this year should have been different?

Pray tell!

Netherlands - 2
Armenia - 4
Hungary - 5
Finland - 11
Switzerland -13

Not quite as I wanted, but... well done Softengine and Sebalter!! I am proud of ya both, and especially - I enjoyed what ya did very much.

Congrats to AT meanwhile!

I think it has been 40+ years or so, with AT, so rather pleased they got the honour.

Que deux points, je comprends l'amerture... Mais marions les avec les jumelles Russe - Twin Twin en seconde puissance, qui sait qu'est-ce que ça donne! :-p

I actually love France in Eurovision as you have produced ground breaking numbers such as Poupée de son, poupée de cire (France Gall) - the first winner ever with a non-ballad tempo.

Plus the most regal and dare I say cruelly usurped second place: C'est le dernier qui a parlé qui a raison, by Amina in 1991.

And Tellier!

So however you see it, France with Italy, Netherlands and Belgium tends to be a highlight to look forward to, thought, yup, arguably not quite the every year.

Eurovision could be a great show if it wasn't tainted by political bias...

Ah well, at least it is about love, but not about discriminatory bias against, meaning no-one hates France or anyone else, statistically:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0514/020514-eurovision-voting

There was some fuss about Russia-Ukraine topic, but both countries songs were so sucky that I saw no risk of either one of them winning.

There for sure is more interest cum motivation cum interest to find out about your culturally or geographically close countries - e.g. there was a Nordics ESC party in Copenhagen and I noted that Swedish papers reported upon second semifinal that all of Scandinavia was in final, i.e. us Finland and Norway.

We neighbours do matter, understandably, and I am most proud of Denmark for ESC 2014 - and was pleased they got it, but I did not vote for them back in 2013.

But I imagine almost all of my fellow Finns checked other Scandinavian songs first, more or less, even as soon as they become available, and a lot of them shall find firm favorites because we have a fairly similar musical affinity and the national selections for Scandinavia are covered in our media.

But never would I vote for Sweden, Denmark, Norway or Iceland if I hated their song - nor would other Finns me thinks, but I shall listen to them with a more vested ear to give these songs a chance.

Do you not do the same..? With Benlux? DE, CH, IT?

I'm no big fan of conspiracy theories, but I'm pretty positive, that some of the votes in the ESC are rigged. C'mon, how difficult is it to set up a server with 1,000 phone-numbers Voice-over-IP, each number allowed for 20 valid calls. That's 20,000 votes. That isn't much you say? Well, Malta has got 417,608 citizens and San Marino 32,471. I'm not saying that these two are affected, but it isn't much more effort to set up two or three servers and go to another country. While some states don't care about winning this at all, others - usually the semi-democratic ones - take every opportunity to let their country shine in international competitions.
While phone voting was at least halfway reliable 20 years ago, it's too easily manipulated nowadays. In my opinion we need something new for these kind of things, like any technique qualifying for signing electronic documents. Though, I'm well aware of the resulting challenge of protecting the voter's privacy.
However, I'm pretty positive as well, that Austria hasn't got one of those governments I'm talking about. ;-D The little extra, that made them win, were the anti-gay comments of certain people before the contest. I think the most votes because of the song alone, where given to the Netherlands.

happened with azerbeidzjan.

https://www.google.nl/#q=azerbeidzjan+eurovision+bought+votes

holy crap for the bloody visions eurovision left us with

People actually spend real-life money to vote for such things? Man...

There is actually minimum threshold of votes needed for tele-vote to be valid, so San Marino is pure jury voting. And as these are paid lines, the phone bill must be picked somewhere, so I am not sure how this technically could be done by VoIP as this would require 20,000 billing addresses too.

Indeed, our Azeri friends, was it, were filmed buying votes the year before with pre-paid mobile hand-outs, but now if anyone get's caught, they will be shut out of the event.

Also, the voting is fairly transparent now, as each 5 jury members' individual ranking of songs are disclosed, and Georgia's jury votes were actually disqualified in final because they all voted the same, when songs must be individually scored. So, essentially the country scores are "average of five" again aggregated with the ranking from televote.

Looking at the end results, I thought the end ranking was pretty fair - and I do genuinely think that Conchita Wurst had the most popular song in balance of it. I am not a fan of power ballads, but his/her voice was one of the best ones in the competition and a lot of people thought Rise Like a Phoneix to be a great song.

A fair victory, I would say, and happy about Austria after all these years.



Absolutely! And mind you: one of the pre-arranged signals to start Carnation Revolution was "E Depois do Adeus", your entry for 1974 ESC, actually.

In Finland: on average 1.1 Million viewers (out of population of 5), and 1.3 Million tuned on to see our lovely Softengine perform. Pretty decent crowd I would say.

Anyways, a few cute pictures submitted by fellow Finns of their homestands for ESC :-)

http://yle.fi/uutiset/talta_nayttivat_suomalaisten_viisukatsomot_-_katso_kuvat/7232719

Even easier to manipulate ;-P

I can think of several possibilities, but of course it'll cost something. Anyway, it's only speculation, so it doesn't really matter.

Of course it is, I don't want to be the Grinch here ;-) Congrats Austria!

Here are a few of my thoughts on the final (I didn't watch any of the semifinals):

I was quite happy with the outcome. I definitely think the best song and artist won.

I was quite surprised that Finland didn't rank higher than it did. I thought it was a great song.

I'm quite embarrassed about our own contribution though. Not only was the Danish song trite and simple, but the melody of the chorus was blatantly stolen.

And what the hell was up with Poland? What were the lyrics of that song? "Vote for us and we'll give you blowjobs backstage after the show"? I'm not a prude, far from it, but I did find the Polish entry to be crass and in poor taste.

Oh, and once again I'm embarrassed on behalf of my fellow countrymen. No, I'm certainly not a fan of the Russian government at the moment, but those two poor Russian teenage girls are definitely NOT Vladimir Putin, and certainly did not deserve the reception the Danish audience gave them.

With Poland, the issue from my perspective is that the display of the folkloric charms was so calculated and cheap that one cannot find any humour, charm or even irony in it.

I am no prude either, I don't think - yet I have to admit that the poor instrument of the so said "Epic Sax Guy" had to bear nothing short of dirty dancing in 2010 in my eyes. Yet the latter episode will surely remain in Eurovision legend in a good sense, because it was so funny and humorous, Poland will be soon forgotten at least.

I think being embarrassed of the Danes more than rest of Europe and beyond is a bit misplaced, as the glory of the ESC is for a great part to do with the traveling fans. I don't think Danes were alone in their whistles. The best stage ever, btw, IMO!

While I was surprisingly pleased with voting, have to confess I missed broader diversity from last year with all those ballads (save lovely Carl Espen) and sentiment of having heard quite a few bits and pieces before.

And hum... DK did not elevate this year, indeed, not, sirree! I can only explain 9th position by a lot of younger girls finding this Basim lad dreamy, lol. :-p

IMO, yes... and no. Whistling to the twins was out of character in terms not being a feel-good reaction that ESC to me mostly should be about.

However, the state of society and activism have always been part of the Eurovision context - even the original purpose of uniting countries of war-torn Europe was political - and to my it would be unfair and unjust to censor the performers to one kitschy-entertainment mold.

When the Israeli and Syrian flags were waved on the stage by PingPong back in 2000 the purpose was the same: opposition of war. The gesture was more positive, arguably, though.

I would hate to see ESC become quite so mindless as the detractors would have it.