Changes to the Swiss selection!
For the Swiss national for the Eurovision Song Contest 2017, changes will be made from how the national selection has been the past years. Entirely international entries are no longer allowed as at least someone among the composers, lyricists or artist(s) must either have a Swiss passport or be a resident of Switzerland.
There used to be a regional division as well, with the Germanophone broadcaster SRF, the Francophone broadcaster RTS and the Italophone broadcaster RSI choosing their entries in different ways. RTS and RSI internally and SRF had their yearly online platform where submissions from all around the world could be uploaded. Now, for next year the online platform has disappeared completely and so have the secured spots the broadcaster used to have in the past (3 from SRF, 2 from RTS and 1 from RSI).
After the submission deadline, which will be announced at a later date, a jury of 20 people, consisting of music experts, producers, musicians, people that are in any other way related to the music industry and journalists will listen to all the songs and choose 20 songs to qualify to a live expert check, which is said to take place on the 4th of December.
The 6 to 10 best of them will get a place in the national final in Zürich, taking place on Sunday February 5, broadcasted on SRF 2, where a winner will be chosen by the televoters solely.