BBC Four Television, The BBC - British Broadcasting Corporation

BBC Four

BBC Four is a BBC television channel available to digital television (Freeview, satellite and cable) viewers in the UK. The part successor (with CBeebies) to BBC Knowledge, it launched on 2 March 2002.
It shows a wide variety of programmes including drama, documentaries, music, international film, comedy and current affairs ... an intelligent alternative to programmes on the mainstream TV channels.
BBC Four has a annual budget of £67m (£49.8m on content, £2m distribution, £15.2 infrastructure) which is only 4.7% of that of BBC One (but 1.8% of the audience) and consequentially has a schedule dominated by multiple opportunities to view.

Programming

The first evening's BBC Four programmes were simulcast on BBC Two. BBC Four is most notable for first showing Larry David's Seinfeld follow-up, Curb your Enthusiasm, and Armando Iannucci's cutting political satire, The Thick of It.
The channel broadcasts a mixture of art and science documentaries, vintage drama (including many rare black-and-white programmes), and non-English language productions such as films from the Artificial Eye catalogue and the French thriller Spiral. On weekdays at 19.00, the channel shows a 30-minute global news programme called World News Today, simulcast with and produced by BBC World.
It screens a number of original documentaries such as The Century of the Self and The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Drama has given the channel some of its most popular programmes, with The Alan Clark Diaries (2003) and Fantabulosa! (2006) being among the highest rated, with over 800,000 viewers.

Another notable production was a live re-make of the 1953 science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment, adapted from the original scripts into a single, two-hour version (though on the night it in fact underran considerably, lasting less than 1 hour 40 minutes), broadcast on the evening of Saturday 2 April 2005. Discounting BBC Four's previous live relays of theatrical Shakespeare productions, this was the first live made-for-television drama to be broadcast by the BBC for twenty years. According to BARB the comedy panel game QI has the highest ratings of any show on BBC Four.
At the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Four won the Non-Terrestrial Channel of the Year award in 2004 and 2006.
On the Freeview digital terrestrial television platform, BBC Four is broadcast in a statistically multiplexed stream in Multiplex B that timeshares with the CBeebies channel; broadcasting from 7 pm to 4 am every day.