The BBC World Service is the world's largest international broadcaster, broadcasting news, speech and discussions in 27 languages to many parts of the world on analogue and digital shortwave platforms, internet streaming, podcasting, satellite, FM and MW relays. The World Service was reported to have reached 188 million people a week on average in June 2009. It aims to be politically independent, as specifically expressed in the BBC Charter agreement, it is non-profit, and does not carry advertising. The English language service broadcasts 24 hours a day.
The World Service is currently funded by grant-in-aid through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government, however from 2014, it will be funded by the compulsory television licence fee levied on every household in the United Kingdom using a television to watch broadcast programmes.
BBC World Service is a patron of The Radio Academy. The Director of the World Service is currently Peter Horrocks.
Read more about BBC World Service: History, Operation, Programming, Presentation, Magazine Publishing
Famous quotes containing the words bbc, world and/or service:
“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.”
—Anonymous. quoted in “Quote Unquote,” Feb. 22, 1982, BBC Radio 4.
“It is from quiet places like this all over the world that the forces accumulate which presently will overbear any attempt to accomplish evil on a large scale. Like the rivulets gathering into the river, and the river into the seas, there come from communities like this streams that fertilize the consciences of men, and it is the conscience of the world that we are trying to place upon the throne which others would usurp.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)