BBC Persian online - Television live

BBC Persian Live Stream

BBC Persian is the BBC's Persian-language television channel - the broadcast voice of the World Service in Farsi, carrying news, current affairs, documentaries and analysis to Persian-speaking audiences in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the worldwide diaspora. Broadcasting from Studio 54D in the Peel Wing of Broadcasting House in London, it produces more than seven hours of original programming every day and streams live around the clock online.

The service stands in a tradition older than television itself: the BBC's Persian radio service began in 1940, and has been one of the corporation's most important - and most contested - language operations for more than eighty years.

News for the Persian-Speaking World

The programming is built on news bulletins covering Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the world - the political, social and economic developments of a region that follows its own news with unique intensity - and on the analysis programs that follow them. 60 Minutes, the channel's flagship discussion program, gathers experts each week for the debates Persian-speaking audiences cannot hear on their domestic channels, from Iranian politics to the intertwined crises of Russia, Yemen and the wider region. Documentaries and current-affairs films dig into society, culture and history, and music programming carries traditional Persian music alongside international repertoire - a full schedule for an audience that stretches from Tehran to Dushanbe to the diaspora's capitals.

From Broadcasting House to Tehran

BBC Persian Television launched in January 2009, extending the Persian service's decades of radio broadcasting to the screen, and it has been jammed in Iran almost ever since - satellite interference that places the channel in the same category as every broadcaster the Iranian authorities would rather their citizens not watch. The jamming has never fully worked: the audience finds the signal, and the channel's reporting on Iran - from elections to protests to the daily texture of Iranian life - reaches the country by satellite, the internet and every route in between. The London newsroom's position, outside the reach of any regional government, is the whole point: the journalism is produced where no one in the region can stop it.

Around the Clock Online

The live stream now carries the channel continuously - the news bulletins, the discussion programs and the documentary output - to whatever screen the viewer holds, with the video archive preserving programs on demand. For the Persian-speaking world, the result is a service that behaves less like a scheduled channel and more like a constant: turn it on at any hour, in any time zone, and the BBC's Persian newsroom in Broadcasting House is on the air - as it has been, in one form or another, since 1940.

BBC Persian Watch Live Streaming now online