BBC Three, the replacement for BBC Choice, is a British television channel from the BBC broadcasting only on digital cable, terrestrial and satellite.

Launched on February 9, 2003 (eleven months after the launch of BBC Four), the channel is described by the BBC as an outlet for "New drama, talent, British comedy, top films and accessible news". The channel is on-air from 19:00 to 04:00 each night, in order to share terrestrial digital bandwidth with the CBBC channel.

The unique '60 second news' format was adopted so that operation of the channel could be completely automated, without the complication of dealing with variable length live news broadcasts.

The channel's idents (developed by Lambie-Nairn ) feature a range of cute orange cone shaped creatures ('the blobs') provided by Aardman Animations.

The output of the channel has been criticised by Private Eye which argues that the £90m set up of the channel was too costly and driven by consultants and much of the schedule is taken up with the celebrity filler items and spin-offs of unpopular programmes such as Fame Academy. The channel has had critical and popular successes with series such as Little Britain but even this been rapidly promoted to the main BBC Channels in 2004.

See also

• List of British television channels

External link

• BBC Three
• Blobular