Bhutan Introduces Television and the Internet on the Same Day

From limited television to television and the Internet in one day

For much of the twentieth century, Bhutan approached modern mass media cautiously.

Radio had developed gradually, but television was another matter. Bhutan Broadcasting Service later described the country as the last in the world to formally allow television. Whatever private or spillover viewing had occurred before then, Bhutan did not yet have its own national television service.

That changed on 2 June 1999.

The date was chosen to coincide with celebrations marking twenty-five years since the coronation of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck.

Bhutan Broadcasting Service launched the country's national television service from Thimphu. BBS's own historical account says the new service initially broadcast for only a few hours each day and was introduced during the Silver Jubilee celebrations.

But television was only half of the communications leap.

Bhutanese government documentation states explicitly that Internet services were also launched on 2 June 1999.

An academic history of Bhutanese media gives the sequence even more precisely: Internet service began that day, followed hours later by Bhutan's first national television broadcast.

So Bhutan did not slowly progress from television to Internet access over decades, as happened across much of the world.

At the level of official national services, it effectively compressed those stages into a Wednesday.

A country widely associated with unusually deliberate modernization introduced a medium that had defined much of the twentieth century and a medium that would transform the twenty-first on the same date.

Most countries had a television age and then an Internet age.

Bhutan scheduled both for June 2.