Special Broadcasting Service Case Study

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The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) was established on 1st January 1978 under the principle of providing multilingual and multicultural radio and television services to Australians whose first language was not English. (Australia Government, 2015) It is a government owned, national broadcasting service that was founded at a time of changing Australia immigration policies. After World War II ended in 1945, the Australian government recognised the need for a bigger population and it implemented a large-scale immigration program. (ABC Splash, 2015) As more immigrants from other countries settles in Australia, it raised the concern that these new settlers might have difficulty with the English language. SBS is chartered with a special mandate to deliver to all Australians, “regardless of geography, age, cultural background or language skills [to] have access to high quality, independent, culturally-relevant Australian media,” and …show more content…

Its first broadcast was the details of the new Medibank health care scheme in 1975. (Wikipedia, 2015) In 1978, these two ethnic-minority radio stations came into the responsibility of SBS with the amendment of the Broadcasting and Television Act 1942 to Special Broadcasting Service. (Wikipedia, 2015) SBS TV was started in April 1979, doing test transmissions, featuring various foreign language programs on ABV-2 Melbourne and ABN-2 Sydney on Sunday mornings. It was then launched as Channel 0/28 at 6:30 p.m. on 24 October 1980. (Wikipedia, 2015) Today, after 35 years, SBS has four television channels (SBS ONE, SBS TWO, NITV and World Movies) and five radio networks (SBS Radio One, TWO & Three, SBS Chill and SBS PopAsia). To keep up with the pace of time, SBS Online was developed in 2010, providing On Demand video streaming service over the Internet. (Wikipedia,