Phonovation

Phonovation of Dublin was selected to handle the Irish voting for the Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. The contest can draw over 100 million viewers and is the largest viewed event in the world.

However, the competition allows only three minutes during which the viewers’ votes from each country have to be collected and counted.

Viewers place their votes by IVR, creating a huge “burst” of traffic in the telephone network and call handling centre during the critical three minutes.

Phonovation stands out as being one Irish company which can provide sufficient telephone call-handling capacity for a sudden rush of calls on this scale.

“We work for Irish radio and TV stations all the time and we do work like this every day. Our capacity was utilised for Eurovision, however bursty traffic of this kind is more likely to create issues in the telephone network than in our own installation.” says Paddy Woods of Phonovation.

The contest has been criticized for biased voting, especially between the Balkan countries which scored well in the contest, but with televoting, the viewers are completely free to vote as they wish.

All of the countries participating in Eurovision now use televising to award country’s points, with the old-style panel vote being retained just in case of problems with the live audience vote.

Saturday’s slick handling of the massive Eurovision vote was particularly pleasing for Phonovation since Ireland had needed to revert to the old-style panel vote last year.

“Reporting is of course, terribly important,” says Paddy Woods. “We were using new Apcentia equipment from C3 Ltd in Cambridge. The equipment was highly efficient in receiving the calls and making the lines available again immediately after each call, then providing the results data for the results. We were delighted to be chosen by RTE to provide Ireland’s Eurovison voting solution.”