It was the main news programme broadcast each weekday at 7:00 pm, on British digital television channel BBC Three between 10 February 2003 to 2 December 2005.

The programme was broadcast for the first time on 10 February 2003, the second night of BBC Three's transmissions, with Julian Worricker and Tazeen Ahmad presenting the first edition.

The BBC announced on 21 October 2005 that The 7 O'Clock News had been axed and would broadcast its final edition at the end of the year.

This was caused by the heavy criticism of the programme in the Barwise report and the BBC's own research undertaken earlier that year.

[10] The last edition of The 7 O'Clock News was broadcast on 2 December 2005, and would be replaced by "high quality factual programming" for 2006.

Since its return to linear television in 2022, BBC Three's news output is made up of a short-form youth-oriented bulletin known as The Catch Up.

It was now noticeably more relaxed and even satirical than the previous version, and was comparable to the then-recently axed Liquid News.