Silicon Valley: The Untold Story

Innovation Effect

An educational series that explains everyday objects and makes complex science accessible through experiments and playful explanations. It shows how discoveries like waves enabled the smartphone, and explores radioactivity, dark energy, and blood circulation, featuring Curie, Röntgen, Newton, and Einstein, showing science is understandable and engaging.

FRONTRUNNERS

FRONTRUNNERS highlights professionals at the very forefront of their field. We showcase their amazing work, discover their motivations, and learn about the challenges they face in the future.

Building the Impossible

Presenter Rob Bell takes us on a voyage around Britain and Ireland to reveal the hidden secrets that make offshore lighthouses such extraordinary feats of engineering.

Stephen Hawking's Science of the Future

Stephen Hawking’s Science of the Future investigates the very latest game changing innovations. Each episode takes one area of progress and sends five top scientists out to actively test the inventions and breakthroughs that are driving it. The team explore human upgrades, the virtual world, bio-mimicry, high-tech emergency responses, and more. Featuring a wide range of examples, from advanced robotics and breathtaking digital actors, to cutting edge smart homes and electronic brain stimulation, the series reveals how science is delivering astonishing improvements to all our lives. Using the evidence they gather, the team reveals the year when each innovation will be rolled out for us all to benefit from, and Hawking then draws out his own uniquely insightful predictions about what our world will be like in the years to come.

How We Got to Now

How We Got To Now with Steven Johnson is a six part documentary series that reveals the story behind the remarkable ideas that made modern life possible; the unsung heroes that brought them into the world – and the unexpected and bizarre consequences each of these innovations has triggered.

Meta Exposed: Secrets From Inside The Tech Giant

Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg to 'connect the world', now many believe parent company Meta is ruining the world through its apps including Instagram. Is that just moral panic or is there a real threat to us and our children? In this series we’ll reveal the real motivations and methods of the tech giant from insiders, whistleblowers, and researchers. We'll also provide tips to keep children safe.

Megacitys - Wenn es Nacht wird in ...

Glittering facades, vibrant life, and people facing the daily struggle for survival. ZDF correspondents each profile a megacity within their reporting area. How do people celebrate, laugh, and love in such a city? How are problems like housing shortages, food supply, transportation, and climate change solved – in metropolises with over ten million inhabitants?

Saving Country Houses with Penelope Keith

From cafes to craft fairs, glamping to ghosts, join Dame Penelope Keith as she meets the owners of Britain’s historic country houses struggling to keep their homes intact. Featured properties include Ashby Manor in Northamptonshire, Chillingham Castle in Northumberland, and Mapperton House in Dorset. As these estates turn to innovative ventures to stay afloat, Keith offers insight into the challenges of maintaining these grand homes in 2025. Will their creative solutions be enough to save their history?

100 Years Ago: From Berlin to the World

A century ago, the world experienced a revolution in mobility. Cities like Berlin grew rapidly, with the Graf Zeppelin soaring over the city in 1928, sparking excitement for airship travel. These majestic airships made ocean crossings faster and more luxurious, and even enabled polar expeditions. At the same time, automobiles and motorcycles became staples for many, although streets became congested. Women like Amelia Earhart and Elly Beinhorn broke barriers in aviation, inspiring new possibilities for both genders in the field of technology. While air travel grew in popularity, trains remained the main long-distance transport. The era also saw an explosion of new mobility options, with faster, cheaper ways to travel across the globe, making the world seem smaller and more connected. However, this golden age of mobility would be cut short by the outbreak of World War II.

House Of The Year

There's no place like home. Brill bungalows, cosy cottages, terrific terraces - Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen leads the search for Northern Ireland’s most desirable dwelling.

Breakthrough

Providing a thought-provoking and imaginative perspective on scientific discovery as it unfolds, each episode follows scientific explorers working on cutting-­edge projects with breakthrough potential, revealing the world of tomorrow... today.

SciTech Now

Capturing the latest breakthroughs in science, technology and innovation. With anchor Hari Sreenivasan, we check out the hottest gadgets, meet the innovators creating the startups of tomorrow and map out the mysteries of the scientific world.

Silicon Fucking Valley

The Icons That Built America

Highlights the talented, often provocative entertainers whose brilliance and rise to stardom transformed American popular culture.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

We have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.

PhantasIA

PhantasIA explores the creative potential of AI in an eclectic, exhilarating, and uninhibited way. A monthly magazine showcasing original creations and the human, political, and environmental questions raised by AI, PhantasIA invites readers to engage with AI through creation in order to better understand it. Far from seeking to replace the artist with the machine, PhantasIA places the artist and the human being at the heart of creation and examines the impact of these new practices.

Visionaries

Keanu Reeves and Gard Hollinger are kindred souls with a bond built on a love of motorcycles and an insatiable curiosity about the world around them. In 2011, they founded ARCH Motorcycle to reimagine what a motorcycle could be. To them, ARCH is a mindset, a lens through which to see the world. This is a journey of curiosity, to understand where human creativity comes from and to shine a light on the visionaries who are pushing the bounds of innovation and changing our world.

Buildings for Society

How can we build architectural environments that help children learn, provide dignity and protection to the most vulnerable, and help offenders rehabilitate? This series looks at new schools, prisons, and homeless shelters whose architects have used innovative techniques to create buildings that help society.

Valley of the Boom

An adrenaline-fueled ride through the culture of speculation, innovation and disruption during Silicon Valley’s unprecedented tech boom and subsequent bust in the 1990s. This mostly scripted series weaves in select documentary elements that help tell the true inside story of the internet’s formative years.

Extraordinary Clouds

Objects of myth that inspire both fear and hope, clouds are as much cultural icons as they are subjects of scientific exploration. They shape ecosystems and ocean cycles, provide vital water, and have long been a source of human fascination and inspiration. Across four destinations and diverse ecosystems—from the Pacific coast of Chile to the cloud cap of Mount Fuji and the “tablecloth” of Africa’s Table Mountain—cloud hunters, meteorologists, scientists, enthusiasts, and indigenous communities help us decode these extraordinary giants. By supplying moisture to the environment, clouds sustain life and make it possible for unique animal and plant species to thrive, even in the driest regions, while creating some of the most spectacular natural scenes on Earth.