The WorldWatch program began in 24 August 1993 with news bulletins from the People's Republic of China, the United States, Germany and Russia. In June 2002, SBS launched the SBS World News Channel, providing repeats of aired bulletins on SBS in addition to updated bulletins. In October 2003, Filipino, Vietnamese and Arabic were added to the World Watch schedule. However, the Vietnamese service was controversial as the broadcaster chosen was the government-controlled VTV4, which was seen as deeply offensive and seen as propaganda to many Vietnamese Australians who fled after the Vietnam War. It was quickly removed on 17 October. The resulting backlash on the decision to air the program has seen SBS air disclaimers on all of its World Watch programs that distance the broadcaster from the editorial content of each bulletin. In 2009, SBS replaced the World News Channel with SBS 2, and the bulletins also moved to the new channel under the "World Watch" banner. Bulletins air from 6am to 6pm, whereas SBS airs the bulletins between 5am and 1:30pm. In 2010, SBS added three new languages: Portuguese, Urdu and Hindi. In October 2015, SBS added eleven new bulletins to the World Watch schedule: African English, Armenian, Bengali, Bosnian, Nepali, Punjabi, Romanian, Sinhalese, Somali, Tamil and Thai; and created an English language line-up on SBS, which moved the Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin bulletins from SBS to SBS 2.
News Bulletins
In determining the World Watch schedule, the policy of SBS has been to match the selection of news programs with the ethnic composition of the Australian population. The World Watch schedule includes news bulletins from Armenia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Chile, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, Malta, Nepal, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Somalia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The programs are usually broadcast unedited. However, SBS does edit programs under "exceptional circumstances" where it breaches broadcasting regulations and its Codes of Practices. In addition, commercials and sponsorship messages are edited out, while the end of the program will also be cut out when the program runs overtime in its timeslot. In case that SBS does not receive the program on time, the program's timeslot would be filled with either its WeatherWatch program or English-language programming from DW-TV in Germany.
