Melodifestivalen (; literally "the Melody Festival") is an annual song competition organised by Swedish public broadcasters Sveriges Television (SVT) and Sveriges Radio (SR). It determines the country's representative for the Eurovision Song Contest, and has been staged almost every year since 1959. Since 2000, the competition has been the most popular television programme in Sweden; it is also broadcast on radio and the Internet. In 2012, the semi-finals averaged 3.3million viewers, and over an estimated four million people in Sweden watched the final, almost half of the Swedish population.