Ukrainian broadcasters STB and UA:PBC have announced that they will continue with their national final format Vidbir to select their Eurovision act in 2019.
The two broadcasters have also announced that their collaboration will continue for another three years. STB will organise the national selection, while UA:PBC covers the cost of the participation fee for Eurovision.
Vidbir will be used to select the 2019 entry, and it will take place during February. There will be three shows in total, two semi-finals to be held on the 9th and 16th of February and the grand final on the 23rd of February. Sergey Pritula will host the show.
The Head of STB has commented on the collaboration between the broadcasters: “Three years ago, starting our cooperation with UA: FIRST, STB channel set a goal for itself – to create a mega-site, on which any professional performer will be able to express itself to the whole of Europe. And we succeeded, because in three years the National Selection stage opened up to the public a lot of new names, gave a good start to many young artists, and the selection itself became the main musical event of the year and attracted the attention of successful producers and singers. This is a very worthy result that we are justly proud of. Therefore, we want to continue our cooperation with UA: FIRST, concentrating on production and creating what STB is best at – large-scale event-based television projects, which is now the National Selection for Eurovision”.
The Chairman of the Board of UA:PBC also commented, saying: “Given the experience of previous years, we are happy to continue our cooperation with STB, because we are confident that Ukraine will be represented best: young artists will receive a rating platform, the audience will be pleased with the quality show, and the vote for the representative of Ukraine will be fair and open. As the youngest European Public Broadcaster, which is in a state of transformation and in conditions of 50% underfunding, we believe that our cooperation with the commercial channel of the Eurovision project is economically feasible: on our own, we now cannot ensure such high quality of the National selection as a commercial television channel”.
