Swatch Internet Time (.beats) Clock

About this tool

Swatch Internet Time was launched in 1998 as a time-zone-free way to tell the time across the internet: each day is divided into 1000 ".beats", numbered @000 to @999, with no hours, minutes, time zones or AM/PM. A beat is 86.4 seconds long (since 1000 beats × 86.4 seconds = 86,400 seconds in a day), measured from midnight in Biel Mean Time (BMT) — a fixed offset of UTC+1, with no daylight saving, based on the Swatch headquarters in Biel, Switzerland. @000 is BMT midnight and @500 is BMT noon.

Is Biel Mean Time the same as a normal time zone?

It's a fixed UTC+1 offset that never changes for daylight saving — it's the one reference point the whole system uses instead of local time zones, which is the entire point of ".beats" being the same number everywhere on Earth at any given moment.

Why isn't this split into hours and minutes?

That's deliberate: the system replaces hours/minutes/seconds entirely with a single running beat count, so there's nothing to convert between regions.