page_title: History of the Eurovision Song Contest
section_title: Competition overview
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Eurovision Song Contest / Competition overview
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the Royal Albert Hall, South Kensington, London.
context_page_description: The Eurovision Song Contest was first held in 1956, originally conceived through a desire to unite European countries through cross-border television broadcasts following World War II, and in doing so to test the capabilities of international broadcast technology. Following a series of exchange broadcasts in 1954, the European Broadcasting Union commissioned an international song competition, from an idea developed by Sergio Pugliese and Marcel Bezençon and originally based on the Italian Sanremo Music Festival.
  64 contests have been held since its first edition, and over 1,500 songs representing 52 countries have been performed on the Eurovision stage as of 2020. Eurovision has seen many changes since its inauguration, such as the introduction of relegation in the 1990s, and subsequently semi-finals in the 2000s, as a response to growing numbers of interested participants. The rules of the contest have also seem multiple changes over the years, with the voting system and language criteria being modified on several occasions.
caption: London: Royal Albert Hall, venue of the 1968 contest
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "6450", "Image ImageLength": "4150", "Image BitsPerSample": "[16, 16, 16]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:10:31 20:06:45", "Image ExifOffset": "252", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "390", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5482", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "6450", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4150"}