The Management of RTS, Serbia’s national broadcaster, terminated their cooperation with “Megaton” – production company that owns the licence of Beovizija. Due to this, RTS can no longer use this festival in order to select their entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, but they are planning a brand new in-house festival, which for now has a working title “RTS competition for Eurovision”. However, Beovizija will still be held, on one of Serbia’s commercial TV channels.
Due to a conflict between RTS’s Head of Entertainment – Olivera Kovačević, and the new co-owner of Megaton (who is also a former manager of Marija Šerifović) – Saša Mirković, In the past years, Megaton was in charge of the production of the festival, whilst RTS was in charge of selecting the juries as well as the acts. As RTS can now no longer use the Beovizija licence, Olivera Kovačević confirmed that they are going to be producing a brand new in-house festival, where the RTS staff will be in charge of the production as well. The festival will go on as long as the COVID pandemic restrictions allow it.
Saša Mirković ahead of Megaton made the following statement and accusations towards Kovačević:
When the festival was created in 2003, RTS did not have the right to send an entry to Eurovision, which is also a private festival, only at the European level. The first winner of Beovizija was Toše Proeski, and then RTS was acting only as a broadcaster. When the EBU allowed RTS to send its representative to the Eurovision Song Contest, the production of “Megaton” handed over the license to RTS for a fee. Since then, RTS has had the task of selecting participants and members of the jury, and we have only done executive production. It has been like that for many years and Beovizija has always been a wonderful festival. After the arrival of Olivera Kovačević to the position of the Head of Entertainment in RTS, problems began with fixing the participant list and fixing in advance the winners of Beovizija.
Additionally, Megaton started a call for songs for Beovizija 2022, with the same deadlines as RTS’s festival for selecting the Eurovision entrants – submission ends on the 1st of December, and the festival will be held in February 2022, on a commercial TV channel. The winner of Beovizija 2022 will receive 50,000 EUR, second placed entry 30,000, whilst the third placed entry will receive a prize of 20,000 EUR.
RTS confirmed that they have already received over 100 entries for their next year’s festival, with a month and a half to go. Olivera Kovačević confirmed that they don’t have a fixed number of entries they want to include in this festival, but that they will go with all of the entries that the pre-selection jury would classify as good quality music. Due to this, RTS’s festival may end up with more than two semi finals, prior to the Final night. The hosts of RTS’s festival are set to be Dragana Kosjerina and Filip Bulatović on the main stage, whilst Stefan Popović and Kristina Radenković would be the Green Room hosts.
The call for songs for representing Serbia in Eurovision is still open, and in order to apply you need to fill out the form on RTS’s website here (click).
Hurricane represented Serbia earlier this year in Rotterdam, and their song “Loco Loco” finished in 15th place in the Grand Final in Rotterdam.
Who would you like to see representing Serbia next year in Turin? Let us know in the comments below, or on our social media pages.
