Television broadcasting in Australia began on 16 September 1956 in 625-line black and white at TCN-9 in Sydney, and has since expanded to include a broad range of public, commercial, community, subscription, narrowcast, and amateur stations across the country.

Colour television in the PAL 625-line format went to a full-time basis on 1 March 1975, while subscription television, on the Galaxy platform, began in January 1995. Digital terrestrial television was introduced on 1 January 2001 in Australia's five largest capital cities.

Australia has three national public broadcasters, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Special Broadcasting Service, as well as more recently, National Indigenous Television.

ABC Television is a division of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, established in 1956. ABC1, ABC2, ABC3 and ABC News 24 are available nationally, in addition to the Australia Network, focused at the Asia-Pacific region.

ABC1 carries a variety of local and national news, current affairs, and sports coverage, as well as Australian arts and comedy programming. It is well known for broadcasting British programming, primarily from the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4.

Australia ( /əˈstreɪljə/), officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent as well as the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area. Neighbouring countries include Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea to the north; the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east.

For at least 40,000 years before European settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who belonged to one or more of roughly 250 language groups. After discovery by Dutch explorers in 1606, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades; the continent was explored and an additional five self-governing Crown Colonies were established.

Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and video content to a dispersed audience via any audio visual medium. Receiving parties may include the general public or a relatively large subset thereof. It has been used for purposes of private recreation, non-commercial exchange of messages, experimentation, self-training, and emergency communication such as amateur (ham) radio and amateur television (ATV) in addition to commercial purposes like popular radio or TV stations with advertisements.

The term broadcast was first adopted by early radio engineers from the Midwestern United States, treating broadcast sowing as a metaphor for the dispersal inherent in omnidirectional radio signals.Broadcasting is a very large and significant segment^[quantify] of the mass media.

Originally all broadcasting was composed of analog signals using analog transmission techniques and more recently broadcasters have switched to digital signals using digital transmission.

The world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks more than quadrupled during the two decades from 1986 to 2007, from 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed) information, to 1.9 zettabytes. This is the information equivalent of 55 newspapers per person per day in 1986, and 175 newspapers per person per day by 2007.