As a result of extensive post-World War II immigration to Australia and the end of the controversial and racist White Australia Policy, the federal government began to consider the need for "ethnic broadcasting" – programming targeted at ethnic minorities and mostly delivered in languages other than English.

[4] In June 1975 at the behest of Minister for Immigration Al Grassby, two "experimental" radio stations began broadcasting: 2EA in Sydney and 3EA in Melbourne (EA stood for "Ethnic Australia"), partly to publicise the Whitlam government's social policy changes to ethnic communities.

[6] In October 1977, the government announced the creation of SBS as a new independent statutory authority for ethnic broadcasting.

SBS TV began test transmissions in April 1979 when it showed various foreign language programs on ABV-2 Melbourne and ABN-2 Sydney on Sunday mornings.

Full-time transmission began on a new television channel at 6:30 pm on 24 October 1980 (United Nations Day).

The first program shown was a documentary entitled Who Are We?, which was hosted by veteran news presenter Peter Luck.

SBS programming content was initially imported from the suppliers in the countries-of-origin of Australia's major migrant communities and then subtitled into English.

[11] SBS also expanded to the cities of Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcastle, Wollongong and the Gold Coast in June of that year.

[17] The SBS Radio and Television Youth Orchestra was soon launched in 1988 with founding conductor Matthew Krel.

[18] Plans to introduce limited commercial-program sponsorship, as well as the establishment of SBS as an independent corporation with its own charter, were put in place in July 1989.

A program called Eat Carpet, showcasing local and international short films, was also launched in 1989.

[19] The passage into law of the Special Broadcasting Service Act 1991 officially made SBS a corporation in 1991.

[20] Throughout the early 1990s, SBS TV coverage was expanded further to include new regional areas such as the Latrobe Valley, Spencer Gulf, Darwin, northeast Tasmania, Cairns and Townsville.

The new building was officially opened on 10 November 1993 by the prime minister, Paul Keating, and a national radio network was launched in January 1994.

A New Media division, responsible for the SBS website, was established at the start of 2000 in time for the first webcast of the Australian Film Institute Awards.

[24] In April 2003, SBS Radio dropped four languages from its schedule, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and Belarusian, and added four others, Amharic, Nepalese, Malay, and Somali, while increasing the broadcast hours for Cantonese, Mandarin, and Arabic.

Tagalog, Vietnamese and Arabic language broadcasts were added to SBS's WorldWatch television schedule in 2003.

[25] However, the Vietnamese community protested the Vietnamese-language service, whose content was taken from VTV4, Vietnam's government-controlled national broadcaster.

He said that the move would raise $10 million in the first year, as he believes that SBS's current strategy of showing ads between programs "is unpopular with viewers".

"On average we lose more than half our audience during these breaks – this is 30 percent more than other broadcasters", claimed Brown upon announcing the new move.

The last major review of the SBS Radio schedule had taken place in 1994, and since then Australia's demographics had changed significantly.

[43][44] SBS rolled out a trial of RDS (Radio Data System) in the Melbourne and Sydney broadcast areas in November 2012.

NOW and NEXT Radio schedule is also displayed on free-to-air Terrestrial Digital Television (DTV) program guides and on TiVo and TBox where applicable.

Alongside news and radio, the SBS in-language units in both Sydney and Melbourne, provide a range of language services for medium to large organisations, private and government businesses.