Eurovision Asia gained a country and lost its chief executive in the same fortnight. Since Bhutan named the contest's first-ever entry on 11 August, Mongolia has become the eleventh participant, Malaysia has skipped the national final entirely and simply announced its artist, three broadcasters have now confirmed an identical voting formula — and Peter Settman has resigned as CEO of the company building the whole thing, twelve weeks before it goes to air.
18+ | New customers only | T&Cs apply | Please gamble responsibly
Here is the state of play as at 24 August, with 82 days to Bangkok.
Mongolia makes eleven
MNC confirmed Mongolia's participation on 14 August. It is the first country added since the contest launched with ten, which makes it the only evidence so far that the Eurovision Asia project is still growing rather than consolidating.
Mongolia will pick its act at Mongolia's Chosen One on 10 October, at 21:00 local time, which pushes the back end of the selection calendar to within five weeks of the Grand Final. That is a tight runway for staging, promotion and a song release, and it is worth remembering that Bangladesh has already had to move once for exactly those reasons.
Malaysia did not hold a show at all
On 15 August, during the 40th edition of Anugerah Juara Lagu — Malaysia's long-running annual song competition, not a Eurovision selection — TV3 announced that Aina Abdul will represent Malaysia in Bangkok.
This is a genuinely different route from every other country on the calendar. There was no Eurovision Asia national final and no public vote on the ticket. Aina Abdul competed at AJL40 with “Kamu”, won Best Performance and the Shopee Voted Artist Icon award, and was named the representative off the back of that platform. The 32-year-old is one of the biggest names in Malaysian music, a repeat AJL winner since 2020 who first surfaced as a finalist on Mentor Legend in 2014.
TV3 is also making a series of it: Malaysia Memburu Impian will follow her from selection through to the contest itself. That is a broadcaster treating the entry as a season of content rather than a one-night result — and it is the sort of sustained domestic promotion that tends to show up later in a jury-friendly, well-rehearsed staging.
Three countries, one formula
When Bhutan's result came in we flagged the 40% jury / 40% domestic public / 20% Rest of the World weighting as the structural detail worth knowing. Two more confirmations have landed since: the Philippines on 17 August, and Mongolia on 23 August.
Three for three is no longer a coincidence. Until a broadcaster says otherwise, treat 40/40/20 as the Eurovision Asia national-final default.
We should correct ourselves on one point here. Our 12 August piece on the Philippine field said the selection would be decided 50% televote and 50% jury. That figure is the format for the Grand Final in Bangkok, and we applied it to the national final in error. Philippine Selection Night runs on 40/40/20, and that article has been corrected. The distinction matters, because the two formats reward different things.
What the pattern means in practice: a fifth of every ticket to Bangkok is being handed out by an audience with no national stake. Those Rest of the World voters are watching ten or eleven shows in a row over two months and comparing entries against each other, not against domestic rivals. That is a cross-contest popularity contest running quietly inside eleven separate national finals, and it systematically advantages acts with an existing international footprint — which, in this field, means the Filipino and Korean entries above all.
The CEO walked
On 19 August, Peter Settman resigned as CEO of Voxovation, the company he co-founded with Eurovision veteran Christer Björkman to build the Asian contest. He told SVT he “chose to resign for personal reasons, but am fully available to everyone in the project and committed to making it a huge success.” He stays on as an owner and consultant.
Take the stated reason at face value — there is no reporting suggesting otherwise. But the timing is what it is: the chief executive of the organising company stepping back with under three months to a first-ever contest in a new territory. Björkman remains, and the EBU-side production structure is unchanged, with Marcus Tang as executive supervisor and Assaf Blecher as executive producer, working with S2O Productions.
The thing to watch is not the resignation itself but whether anything downstream of it slips. Voxovation's job between now and November is the least visible and most failure-prone part of the project: sponsorship, broadcast deals, the Bangkok production build. A first edition has no institutional muscle memory to fall back on.
The full calendar
Two tickets booked, nine to go. The next one is Philippine Selection Night on 30 August, where all ten songs are already out. Then South Korea's Korea's Next Wave on 4 September — the show most likely to produce the pre-contest favourite, and still the biggest unknown on the board.
Vietnam remains the outlier. VTV is confirmed as a participant but has announced neither a selection format nor a date, and every other country now has at least a month named. With the Grand Final on 14 November, Vietnam is running out of calendar.
Market status
Still nothing. As of 24 August 2026 there are no Eurovision Asia markets on Polymarket — the Eurovision tag carries only the 2027 participation markets — and no traditional operator has opened a book on the contest or on any national final. Our Eurovision Asia hub tracks that daily.
That absence is itself informative. Bookmakers open books where they expect turnover, and eleven countries with a combined audience in the hundreds of millions have not yet cleared that bar. The likeliest trigger is the Bangkok field being complete in mid-October, which leaves roughly four weeks of trading before the final — a short window in which prices will be formed fast and, initially, badly.
Quick answers
How many countries are in Eurovision Asia 2026? Eleven. Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. Mongolia was added on 14 August.
Who has been selected so far? Two artists: Nyendra for Bhutan with “Lhayi Semo”, and Aina Abdul for Malaysia.
When is Eurovision Asia 2026? Saturday 14 November 2026, at IdeaLive in Bangkok. The Grand Final is decided 50% jury, 50% public — not the 40/40/20 used by the national finals.
Why did the Eurovision Asia CEO resign? Peter Settman stepped down as Voxovation CEO on 19 August citing personal reasons. He remains an owner and consultant, and co-founder Christer Björkman is still with the project.
Can I vote from outside Asia? Yes, in the national finals. Every confirmed selection so far carries a Rest of the World public vote worth 20%, and the shows stream on the official Eurovision YouTube channel.