Click online

Click (previously Click Online) is a weekly BBC television programme covering news and recent developments in the world of consumer technology, presented by Spencer Kelly.

There are five editions of the programme, including two 30-minute programmes: the first is produced for a UK audience and shown on BBC News and BBC TWO, the second is produced for a global audience, aired on BBC World News, usually identical with a commercial break in the middle. The 15-minute version is shown on BBC One and BBC News during (at the weekend). The fourth edition runs for 5 minutes on BBC World News at selected times of the week featuring one story. The fifth goes out on BBC TWO on Monday morning at 10:35am.

Thursday 29 December 2005 marked the last edition of Click Online, as the show was previously known. This coincided with the departure of presenter Stephen Cole after 295 shows. The programme was rebranded with new music and titles and now concentrates more on consumer issues, and not necessarily the internet or what users can do or visit "online".

The 12 March 2016 programme was broadcast in 360-degrees, and is the first entire episode of a TV programme to be broadcast thus.

BBC World Service broadcasts a weekly sister radio show, also called, presented by Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson.

Presenters[edit]

The current presenter of Click is Spencer Kelly who had already been a reporter and producer on the show, and also compiled reports for on Channel 5. Kate Russell introduces featured websites in the weekly Webscape segment.

Previous presenters of the show include Stephen Cole who left the BBC to work for Al Jazeera International.

Other journalists occasionally present segments of the programme, brief biographies of whom can be found on the Click website.

Botnet controversy[edit]

In 2009 the show and the BBC produced some controversy when it aired a special episode highlighting the dangers of botnets and how easy it was to get caught in one. The show bought control of a botnet of some 22, 000 infected computers (for "a few thousand dollars") from a Russian hacker, and used it to send spam to an email address set up for the experiment and to perform a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a website set up by Prev-X (an internet security company that provided technical support for the show). After the programme was made the computers on the botnet were sent a piece of software to remove the malware and a warning was sent to them telling the users what had happened and that they were vulnerable.