[Stooky Bill]

I'm not mistaken - the EBU is providing a 'non-commercial' feed of the shows, known by the EBU as the clean. Though how this differs from the main I don't know (I'll try and watch then for comparison later in the week).

There are several feeds of the Main for resilience so the BBC production team have them available as outside sources too so they still have to be ready to blank that if need be. Yes they have the rehearsals to know where the sponsorship bits will be. The voting graphics were played out on Monday so that every broadcaster could line up their telephone number graphics 

As you say there's also the Rest of the World feed. As far as I know this and the clean are sent out as unilaterals just to those who need them, but the main feeds are fed out via satellite as multilaterals to every member

Note - this is the case this year, whether theres been a commercial free version in other years I don't know.

Fair enough if you know for sure! I just didn't quite understand why the BBC would be blanking stuff if they had access to a clean feed.

As I've already said in an earlier post - I suspect the commercial free version is just free of sponsorship in graphics, but not in VT segments. I'll have to try and compare the two when I can, but that makes sense as its straightforward to have multiple graphics engines, but less so to run multiple versions of video clips. 

Also as said above (and in the article above that) the BBC gallery have the main version available too so need to have the blanking available should that be used