The History of Junior Eurovision Start Times
For the Eurovision Song Contest each May, it has been a fact barely debated that the show starts at 21:00 CEST every year. Regardless of whether the show is being hosted in Lisbon or Baku – that start time is an unwavering part of the circus.
However for Junior Eurovision it has always been a debate, and full of constant change during its shorter history.
The show began its life in a slightly earlier primetime of 20:15 CET for most of its beginnings, before eventually being changed in 2016 to an afternoon broadcasting slot instead.
Start times for Junior Eurovision through its history, as provided by Eurovoix.
- 2025 – 17:00 CET
- 2024 – 18:00 CET
- 2021 to 2023 – 16:00 CET
- 2020 – 17:00 CET
- 2016 to 2019 – 16:00 CET
- 2012 to 2015 – 20:15 CET
- 2011 – 19:30 CET
- 2003 to 2010 – 20:15 CET
When the change to go into an afternoon slot was established, then Executive Supervisor for Junior Eurovision Jon Ola Sand revealed that the Steering Group for the competition had “many members” across the Eurovision family that “felt that the timeslot was not suited to children and family viewing”.
Clearly there is difference in where Junior Eurovision is today compared to in 2015. Not only is the 2026 edition of Junior Eurovision going back to primetime, the start time of the show is going to be 21:00 CEST – the same start time as the Eurovision Song Contest has, and the latest ever for a Junior Eurovision Song Contest.
Let’s see what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s ugly about Junior Eurovision starting in primetime.
The Good
Primetime Is Primetime For A Reason
The most obvious winner in this scheduling shift is the television broadcast itself. A 21:00 CEST start time places Junior Eurovision square in the traditional primetime Saturday night slot across Central and Western Europe.
Mid-afternoon broadcasts have always been an awkward fit. Afternoon television attracts low casual viewing numbers, struggles to secure high-profile promotion, and rarely gets lead-in coverage from main evening news bulletins. By placing the show at 21:00 CEST, broadcasters can treat Junior Eurovision as the flagship show of the evening, inheriting established prime-time viewing habits as people retire for the evening. In 2025 Junior Eurovision reached 16 million viewers across 14 different markets. That number can be expected to significantly increase this year.
Eurovision Has Always Been….Dark
The Eurovision Song Contest has developed from its beginnings in early TV studios to large arena layouts full of colour and commotion. On screen it isn’t a static broadcast but a full on light show built for TV spectacle.
By default, Eurovision is dark, and the use of lighting rigs, pyrotechnics and LED screens add colour and emotion onto the stage, and onto the broadcast. But there’s no natural light to be seen inside a Eurovision venue.
With afternoon broadcasts, it always felt juxtaposed that Junior Eurovision was thrusting viewers into a dark enclosed room away from natural light in the middle of the day. Returning to primetime slots makes the viewing experience a lot more natural.
The Logistics and Atmosphere
For fans and families attending the show in person, an evening start time is a much more natural flow than earlier shows require. I remember attending Junior Eurovision in Nice how the day felt rushed before the broadcast, and the challenges in navigating early lunch logistics, queueing in broad daylight, and then when the show was over being just out a trifle too late to have time to go back home to get re-dressed to head for dinner.
Conversely a 21:00 CEST start allows the day to flow into a proper event atmosphere and ensures that the show is the climax of the evening.
Malta hosted their first Junior Eurovision on a Saturday evening back in 2014. There the island hosted Junior Eurovision with a seriousness and festivity that hasn’t been topped since and likely never will again. But one of my strongest memories and biggest goosebump moments was working in the Press Centre that year while Malta’s operatic starlet Federica Falzon soared through ‘Diamonds’. The cheers from the home crowd shook the Press Centre located through at least two separate doors away in a temporary structure outside the Marsa Shipbuilding complex.
An evening audience will likely just be those few percentage points more wired and more ready to ‘festa’.
The Bad
Late Hours for the Target Audience
The most significant drawback to this change is the most fundamental one: Junior Eurovision is a show performed by and targeted at children and young people.
A broadcast starting at 21:00 CEST will run until roughly 23:30 CEST. For young viewers in that Central European time zone, that means staying up well past bedtime. For the acts aged between 9 and 14 themselves, it demands keeping focus through until approaching midnight, coming at the end of an exhausting week filled with rehearsals, activities and nerves. Now these children will likely have experience being exposed in the entertainment industry which is more evening-focused, but this is still pushing the young people beyond what their natural body clocks may do.
Now I can be the first to remind people that there is a quirk in this for 2026. Yes we have the latest Junior Eurovision start time in history, but for most of the competing countries it falls the day before the clocks go back one hour, meaning 21:00 becomes just 20:00 the following day. Maybe that promised extra hour of sleep in the morning will be enough to convince some parents to let their kids stay up an hour later.
Maybe, this is the only day of the year when 21:00 might actually, just about, work out.
Severe Time Zone Penalties in the East
While 21:00 CEST translates to a comfortable 20:00 GMT for viewers in the UK, Ireland, and Portugal, the map tells a very different story the further east you travel:
For those on the east of the continent that means potentially missing it in its entirety. In Georgia and Armenia, two of Junior Eurovision’s most loyal participants, the start time is now set to be 23:00, meaning finishing around 01:30. One can not expect many young Armenians or Georgians to stay up for that.
When Junior Eurovision moved to an afternoon viewership, it was a world where Eastern Europe was the dominant force of Junior Eurovision, and nine of the sixteen nations were in time zones later than CET when the show aired.
That has shifted today as more Western nations participate, and the number of nations participating in time zones later than CEST is only four, Cyprus, Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine.
Where To Schedule Junior Eurovision On TV
While an afternoon slot was awkwardly placed, it offered one distinct advantage: little competition. Junior Eurovision had a clear runway on the European television calendar and wasn’t pushing out larger programming from schedules.
Moving to 21:00 CEST throws the contest straight into the highest-stakes battleground on European television. It will now go head-to-head against established domestic primetime broadcasts and some of the biggest competitors for viewers. Yes, Junior Eurovision can benefit from more casual viewers watching television at this time, but also potentially lose some viewers that would dip into it to other big-budget productions and film premieres on terrestrial television.
In some cases Junior Eurovision gets bumped to ‘lesser’ stations. In Portugal Junior Eurovision moved from RTP 1 to RTP 2, allowing the number one station to stick to their news output, followed by Masterchef, and in Italy RAI 2 is no longer broadcasting, with the live broadcast instead switching to kids focused RAI Gulp. Moving to primetime for more viewers works…but only if you stay on the same most widely reached stations.
While using a youth network is logistical, a broadcast stretching to 23:30 CEST sits awkwardly, with little to no casual viewership at that time. Junior Eurovision isn’t a big enough event to keep those important viewership slots on some broadcasts to keep it on the mainstream stations.
The Ugly
A Westward Tilt on the Scoreboard?
The most unpredictable consequence of a 21:00 CEST start time lies in the voting system. Unlike the adult contest, Junior Eurovision allows viewers to vote for their own country online, a method largely unchanged since the 2017 edition. Previously it has been noted that there has been correlation between viewership and success on the Junior Eurovision scoreboard.
Votes can be cast before the show, but the conservative expectation is that the majority of votes are still being recorded during the live show rather than beforehand.
Moving the show to a slot that favours Western and Central European bedtimes over Eastern European ones creates a potential demographic skew. If kids in Yerevan or Tbilisi are asleep while families in Madrid, Paris, and Rome are watching in prime time, surely the online vote naturally amplify even more these westward nations simply due to who is awake and watching live?
In particular, I would note Spain in this regard. With La 1 broadcasting Junior Eurovision live, pushing voting adverts on their channel as soon as pre-show voting opened, and a culture that is already one of Europe’s most late evening focused, it is realistic to suggest that time zone could play a role in this change.
The Contestant Experience After Midnight
At 23:30 CEST the credits will start to roll as the winner is performing their reprise to the audience. Thereafter the show finishes, everybody packs their belongings from the green room, and heads back to the hotel.
Tiredness will kick in big time, meaning if anybody will want to celebrate it will be pushing well into the early hours of Sunday morning.
I note from Armenia’s hosting in 2022 that, with the earlier start time, the organisers had booked the local theme park on Sunday evening for the exclusive use of the Junior Eurovision delegations to round off the week in style and a true celebration of an intense week. Obviously with this start time nothing similar can be organised. It very much means that the end of the show is the end.
I anticipate some of the delegations will be saying their goodbyes very soon after their curtain goes down on the live broadcast, then packing their belongings and maybe squeezing in a few hours of sleep before early flights the next day.
Reopening the Identity Debate: Who is this contest actually for?
Ultimately, moving back to 21:00 CEST reopens the fundamental question that has trailed Junior Eurovision since its inception in 2003.
Is Junior Eurovision a genuine children’s event designed to celebrate young talent on terms that suit young people? Or is it a miniature clone of the adult Eurovision Song Contest, optimised for primetime television ratings and production values?
By returning to the exact start time of the senior contest, the EBU has made a clear statement about production value and television impact. Whether that choice works for the young participants on stage and the kids watching at home remains the big question hanging over Malta.
But the realities of 2026 and beyond are that TV and event viewership is very different. Linear television is less important, and one can watch Junior Eurovision on demand via various different platforms internationally. When we talk about reach in this article, we talk about reach in terms of TV viewership, whereas in the modern media landscape it is most often discussed in terms of social media appearances. And even in this show you can engage by voting before the live show has even begun.
In that way, the success of Junior Eurovision isn’t achieved primarily through a 150-minute live TV event, but asynchronously in content that lives forever, made before and enjoyed afterwards.
With that framing, there’s arguments that the start time for Junior Eurovision should be more focused on an artist welfare and fairness perspective rather than squeaking out primetime viewing figures.