Australian public broadcaster SBS has expanded its international news offering, adding news bulletins in the major South Asian languages Malayalam and Gujarati.

The news bulletins from India’s public broadcaster Prasar Bharati are being shown on its SBS WorldWatch channel.

SBS WorldWatch launched in May 2022 as a free-to-air channel, expanding the broadcaster’s international and multilingual news offering. The channel provides Australians with access to news bulletins from around the world in languages other than English.

The two bulletins have been added to better serve Australia’s evolving news audiences, as speakers of Gujarati have increased by 54 percent since the 2016 Australian census and speakers of Malayalam by 48 percent.

Central to the channel’s offering are SBS’s flagship half-hour nightly news bulletins in Mandarin and Arabic, produced in-house, serving the two largest non-English language audiences in the country.

Director of News and Current Affairs, Mandi Wicks, said: “With the launch of SBS WorldWatch, the SBS network has undergone broader rescheduling of our multilingual TV news across the network, now offering 66 news bulletins from 49 different broadcasters in 36 languages other than English, and 20 in English.”

SBS WorldWatch builds on SBS’s commitment to provide comprehensive news and information across its network – in English through SBS World News and in more than 60 languages across SBS Radio services, podcasting and digital platforms.

(Photo: SBS)