ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

bbc.co.uk is launched

12 December 1997

The innovation of the internet was championed internally by Director-General John Birt, who saw how it could transform ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½'s global media role, and mobilised R&D and managerial expertise to make it happen. There were initial problems that publication of web pages did not sit within the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Charter, but this obstacle was overcome, and on 15 December 1997, the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ website was officially launched.

Screenshots of bbc.co.uk as it was in 1997

Online milestones quickly followed: that Christmas Day, the Queen's Christmas Speech was shown live online for the first time. Burgeoning sites for sport, weather and children's content quickly followed, the latter transforming a generation's use of media.

By 2005, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½'s online service was reaching almost 12 million users a month. Then in December 2007, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ iPlayer launched, growing into a market-leading service used by the vast majority of the UK population. In 2012 ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Online delivered the first comprehensively digital Olympic Games. In May 2021, monthly reach for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Online was 81% of 16+ adults in the UK (43.2m), whilst average weekly reach was 61% (32.5m). ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Online had some record traffic levels in 2020, largely driven by News and Covid spikes, and regularly reached over 100 million unique browsers a week.

Further reading

Search by Tag:

Rebuild Page

The page will automatically reload. You may need to reload again if the build takes longer than expected.

Useful links

Theme toggler

Select a theme and theme mode and click "Load theme" to load in your theme combination.

Theme:
Theme Mode: