Special Broadcasting Service

• 1. Introduction

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  The Special Broadcasting Service, known to Australians simply as SBS, began life on a Sunday morning in April 1979, broadcasting foreign-language programs to a small corner of Melbourne and Sydney. What started as an experiment in multicultural radio has grown into a broadcaster running six television channels, seven radio networks, and a streaming service reaching audiences across an entire continent.

  At its core, SBS exists to do something no other Australian broadcaster is chartered to do: reflect the country's multilingual reality. Its official purpose is to inform, educate, and entertain all Australians while mirroring the multicultural society they live in. Today, SBS Radio broadcasts in 74 languages. The full-time television service did not exist until 1980. How did a country that once legally restricted foreign-language radio to two and a half hours a week build one of the world's most distinctive multilingual broadcasters? And what battles did it have to survive along the way?

• 2. Immigration and the Airwaves

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  Until 1970, Australian law banned radio stations from broadcasting in foreign languages for more than two and a half hours per week. That constraint sat awkwardly against a country being reshaped by waves of post-World War II immigration. The end of the White Australia Policy forced the federal government to reckon with a broadcasting landscape that was simply not built for the population it was meant to serve.

  On the 9th of June 1975, two experimental radio stations went to air at the initiative of Al Grassby, the Minister for Immigration. Station 2EA launched in Sydney and 3EA in Melbourne, the EA standing for Ethnic Australia. Their purpose was partly to publicise the Whitlam government's social policy changes to ethnic communities across the country.

  The Fraser government moved quickly after that. By March 1976, a Consultative Committee on Ethnic Broadcasting had been established. A National Ethnic Broadcasting Advisory Council followed in January 1977. Early discussions floated the idea of folding ethnic broadcasting into the Australian Broadcasting Commission, but that plan was dropped by mid-1977. In October of that year, the government instead announced that a brand new independent statutory authority would be created, achieved through an amendment to the Broadcasting Act 1942. SBS formally came into existence on the 1st of January 1978, with Dr Grisha A. Sklovsky as its inaugural Chair and Ronald Fowell as its first executive director.

• 3. Television Arrives

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  SBS began as a radio operation, with oversight of only the two existing stations, 2EA and 3EA. The push toward television came from the Ethnic Television Review Panel, established by the government in March 1979, which recommended expanding multilingual services to the screen. Test transmissions followed in April 1979, when various foreign-language programs were shown on ABV-2 Melbourne and ABN-2 Sydney on Sunday mornings.

  Full-time transmission on a new channel began at 6:30 pm on the 24th of October 1980, United Nations Day. The first program shown was a documentary called Who Are We?, hosted by veteran news presenter Peter Luck. SBS broadcast on both UHF Channel 28 and VHF Channel 0, with the VHF frequency already marked for eventual discontinuation.

  Bruce Gyngell, the man who had introduced television to Australia in 1956, was given the task of presenting the first batch of programs on the new station. Programming was initially imported from the countries of origin of Australia's major migrant communities, then subtitled into English. By October-November 1983, the service had expanded to reach Canberra, Cooma and Goulburn, adopting the name Network 0-28 and the slogan that would define the network for years: Bringing the World Back Home. The name was simplified to SBS in February 1985, and cities including Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcastle, Wollongong and the Gold Coast were added to the network in June of that year.

• 4. Fights for Independence

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  On the 5th of January 1986, SBS ceased broadcasting on VHF Channel 0. The low-frequency channel had not worked well with all antennas, and the VHF licence had already been extended by a year; the move left SBS on UHF alone at a time when many Australians still lacked UHF antennas.

  The more dangerous threat came from government itself. In August 1986, legislation was proposed that would have folded SBS into the ABC. The reaction from ethnic-minority communities and SBS staff was fierce. The proposed merger became a flashpoint for communities that had fought for a dedicated voice and feared losing it inside a larger, English-language institution. The protests worked. Prime Minister Bob Hawke announced in 1987 that the amalgamation would not proceed.

  Following that victory, SBS moved to strengthen its identity. The SBS Radio and Television Youth Orchestra was launched in 1988 with founding conductor Matthew Krel. Plans for limited commercial sponsorship and a formal independent charter were put in motion in July 1989. The passage of the Special Broadcasting Service Act 1991 formally established SBS as a corporation, giving it legal standing independent of any future government impulse to dissolve it into another body.

• 5. Programming and Controversy

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  South Park, produced by Comedy Central, became SBS's most successful imported television series after it first aired on the network in 1997. That success reflects something central to how SBS built its audience: a willingness to broadcast material that Australia's commercial networks would not touch.

  Not every programming decision landed smoothly. In 2003, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Arabic language bulletins were added to the WorldWatch television schedule. The Vietnamese community responded with protests over the Vietnamese-language service, whose content came from VTV4, Vietnam's government-controlled national broadcaster. Viewers who had fled the country following the Vietnam War found the portrayal of the communist Vietnamese flag and Ho Chi Minh deeply offensive, and they pointed to VTV4's silence on political arrests and religious oppression. SBS removed the bulletin from the schedule and introduced disclaimers before all externally produced bulletins to distance the network from content it did not produce itself.

  In the same year, SBS Radio dropped four languages from its schedule: Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh and Belarusian. Four new languages were added in their place: Amharic, Nepalese, Malay and Somali. Broadcast hours for Cantonese, Mandarin and Arabic were simultaneously increased. A far larger overhaul of the radio schedule came in April 2013, the first major review since 1994. Six new languages were added: Malayalam, Dinka, Hmong, Pashto, Swahili and Tigrinya, bringing the total number of languages from 68 to 74.

• 6. Advertising and Funding

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  On the 1st of June 2006, managing director Shaun Brown announced that SBS would begin placing commercial breaks inside programs rather than only between them. He argued that the existing approach was costing the network viewers, claiming SBS lost more than half its audience during between-program breaks, which he said was 30 percent more than other broadcasters experienced. The change, he projected, would raise $10 million in the first year.

  In-show advertising commenced on the 9th of October 2006, during the 7:30 pm broadcast of MythBusters. Commercial breaks remained capped at five minutes per hour, well below the fifteen minutes per hour permitted on fully commercial Australian stations. Individual breaks ran between one and two minutes.

  Today SBS receives about 80 percent of its funding from tax revenue, making it a hybrid-funded public broadcaster rather than purely commercial or purely government-funded. That mix has shaped every major decision in the network's history, from the decision to accept limited advertising to the expansion of services into languages that serve small communities with no commercial broadcasting footprint.

• 7. NITV and Newer Channels

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  On the 8th of May 2012, SBS received $158 million in government funding, of which $15 million would be allocated yearly toward a new free-to-air channel devoted to the indigenous peoples of Australia. The channel was designed to replace the existing National Indigenous Television. On the 12th of December 2012, NITV was re-launched as an SBS-operated free-to-air channel, replacing SBS4, with 90 percent of its staff transferring across to the new operation.

  The food channel SBS Food Network launched on the 17th of November 2015, becoming SBS Food three years later on the 17th of November 2018. In June 2016, SBS announced that SBS 2 would become SBS Viceland, carrying content from US-Canadian youth media company Vice Media from November 2016.

  World Movies had existed as a subscription channel since October 1995, focusing on independent international films. It was closed on the 31st of January 2018, then relaunched on free-to-air television on the 1st of July 2019 as SBS World Movies. The sixth free-to-air channel, SBS WorldWatch, was announced on the 12th of January 2022 and launched on the 23rd of May 2022. It broadcasts foreign-language bulletins in more than 30 languages, alongside locally produced news bulletins in Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. The Arabic and Mandarin bulletins had already debuted on SBS On Demand on the 15th of February 2022, ahead of the channel's own launch.