BBC World Service
BBC World Service is an international multimedia broadcaster, delivering a wide range of language and regional services on radio, TV, and digital.
It reaches a weekly audience of around 364 million people around the world. It is one of the UK’s most important cultural exports - inspiring and illuminating the lives of people across the globe, helping them make sense of the world we live in. A third of BBC World Service's weekly global audience is aged between 15 and 24. As part of BBC World Service, BBC Learning English teaches English to global audiences, offering free audio, video and text material to learners around the world.
In recent years, BBC World Service has undergone its biggest expansion since the 1940s. It now operates in more than 40 languages around the world, from Pidgin to Korean, with new and expended bureaux in locations Cairo to Seoul, Belgrade to Bangkok. Its largest news operations outside the UK are in Delhi and Nairobi.
BBC World Service is funded from the licence fee. In 2016 the UK Government awarded it a £291 million grant administered by UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), for a four-year programme of modernisation and creation of new language services. In 2021, the FCDO provided £94.4m to help the BBC World Service build on its work upholding global democracy through accurate, impartial and independent news reporting. This includes £8 million in additional investment to tackle disinformation and further improve the BBC’s digital offer to audiences around the world.
BBC World News and BBC.com
BBC World News is our commercially funded international news and information television channel, broadcasting in English 24 hours a day in many countries across the world. BBC World News is available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, around 300 million households and 1.8 million hotel rooms. The channel provides hourly bulletins with news, business, sport and weather information, and broadcasts the best of the BBC’s current affairs, documentary and lifestyle programming.
BBC.com, our global commercial news website, brings news and features to a huge international audience, including the USA, the world’s largest media market.