BBC on Wikipedia part 6 (Service on Radio)
The BBC has five major national stations:
- Radio 1 ("the best new music and entertainment")
- Radio 2 (the UK's most listened to radio station, with 12.9 million weekly listeners)[48]
- Radio 3 (classical and jazz music)
- Radio 4 (current affairs, factual, drama and comedy)
- Radio 5 Live (24 hour news, sports and talk)
In recent years some further national stations have been introduced on digital radio platforms including Five Live Sports Extra (a companion to Five Live for additional events coverage), 1Xtra (for black, urban and gospel music), 6 Music (less mainstream genres of music), BBC Radio 7 (comedy, drama & children's programming) and BBC Asian Network (British South Asian talk, music and news in English and in many South Asian languages), a station which had evolved from BBC Local Radio origins in the 1970s and still is broadcast on Medium Wave frequencies in some parts of England. In addition the BBC World Service is now also broadcast nationally in the UK on DAB.
There is also a network of local stations with a mixture of talk, news and music in England and the Channel Islands as well as national stations (Nations' radio) of BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru (in Welsh), BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio nan Gaidheal (in Scots Gaelic), BBC Radio Ulster, and BBC Radio Foyle.
The BBC also provides separate local radio services for the Channel Islands of Guernsey- BBC Guernsey and Jersey- BBC Radio Jersey, with local TV news coverage from BBC Channel Islands. These services are provided as a convenience, since strictly the Channel Islands are not part of the United Kingdom so the funding for the Guernsey and Jersey broadcasts comes largely from locally collected licence fees.
The BBC does not offer separate local services for the Isle of Man, partly because the island has long been served by the independent commercial radio station Manx Radio.
For a worldwide audience, the BBC produces the BBC World Service funded by the Foreign Office, which is broadcast worldwide on shortwave radio, and on DAB Digital Radio in the UK. The World Service is a major source of news and information programming and can be received in 150 capital cities worldwide, with a weekly audience estimate of 163 million listeners worldwide. As of 2005, the Service was broadcasting in 33 languages and dialects (including English), though not all languages are broadcast in all areas.[49]
In 2005, the BBC announced that it would substantially reduce its radio broadcasting in Thai language (closed in 2006)[50] and Eastern European languages and divert resources instead to a new Arabic language satellite TV broadcasting station (including radio and online content) in the Middle East to be launched in 2007.[51]
Since 1943, the BBC has also provided radio programming to the British Forces Broadcasting Service, which broadcasts in countries where British troops are stationed.
All of the national, local, and regional BBC radio stations, as well as the BBC World Service, are available over the Internet in the RealAudio streaming format. In April 2005, the BBC began trials offering a limited number of radio programmes as podcasts.[52]
Historically, the BBC was the only (legal) radio broadcaster based in the UK mainland until 1967, when University Radio York (URY), then under the name Radio York, was launched as the first (and now oldest) legal independent radio station in the country. However, the BBC did not enjoy a complete monopoly before this as several Continental stations (such as Radio Luxembourg) broadcast programmes in English to Britain since the 1930s and the Isle of Man based Manx Radio began in 1964.
BBC Radio 1 is carried in the United States and Canada on XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio.
The BBC is a patron of The Radio Academy
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