SRF 1 broadcasts general-interest programming in German to German-speaking Switzerland: news, entertainment, satire, games, children's shows and regional updates several times a day, all built to serve a broad national audience rather than any single niche. It streams free anywhere in the world on Radio Shuffle.
The station began in 1931 as Radio Beromünster, named for the small municipality that hosted its original transmitter, and became the first German-language radio station for German-speaking Switzerland. It carried that identity through decades of renaming, from DRS 1 to its current name, SRF 1, adopted on 16 December 2012 as part of a wider rebrand that touched the broadcaster's television channels and four other radio stations at the same time. Through all of that, the programming itself stayed recognizably the same general-audience format it had always run.
One show in particular has defined SRF 1's Sunday mornings for nearly fifty years. Persönlich, which premiered in April 1976 under original host Charles Clerc, was Switzerland's first live radio talk show, built on two guests sharing stories from their own lives in conversation rather than a scripted interview. Guests range from well-known figures in culture, business and politics to people with no public profile at all, and the format has proven durable enough to pass through multiple hosts, including Michèle Schönbächler from August 2022 and Olivia Röllin from April 2023, while still drawing roughly 450,000 listeners live each Sunday.
That mix, a near-century-old transmitter heritage paired with a conversational format built on genuine human stories rather than celebrity packaging, is what has kept SRF 1 as the anchor station of Swiss German-language radio for generation after generation of listeners.