BR24live carries a title most stations can't claim: the format it runs today started life as the first dedicated news station in German-language radio, a full news cycle on the air before any competitor had tried the concept in German.
Born in 1991 as B5 aktuell
The station launched on May 6, 1991 under the name B5 aktuell, operated by Bayerischer Rundfunk, the public broadcaster for Bavaria, according to its documented history. Going all-news was not yet a proven idea in German radio when B5 aktuell picked it, and the station spent three decades building the rolling, update-every-15-minutes format into a fixture of Bavarian public broadcasting rather than a novelty format.
A 2021 Rebrand Built for a Multi-Platform Newsroom
On May 3, 2021, Bayerischer Rundfunk announced it would fold B5 aktuell into a single unified news brand, and the station became BR24 on July 1, 2021. The rebrand wasn't just a name change: it merged the radio station, the broadcaster's Rundschau television news program, and its digital news operation under one identity, so a single BR24 brand now covers a website, a 24-hour radio station, and a TV news program rather than three separately branded operations. The frequencies stayed exactly where B5 aktuell had always broadcast, which meant the audience did not have to go looking for a new signal, just a new name on the same dial position.
A Sunday Schedule That Still Slows Down
Even inside a rolling-news format, BR24 carves out room for something less urgent: Sunday programming shifts into 25-minute thematic segments covering culture, politics, science and sport, interrupted only by news and traffic updates every 30 minutes instead of the weekday rhythm. On select holidays like Christmas and Easter Monday, the station runs half-hour regional programs called "Notizen aus," Notes From, giving space to specific Bavarian regions that the daily rolling format doesn't usually have room for.
Three decades after Bavaria put the first all-news station on German radio, the format has survived a full rebrand and a merger with television and digital news, and it still finds room on a Sunday to slow down and tell one story properly instead of updating the headlines every fifteen minutes.