Abstract  In a wireless environment, the bandwidth of the channels and the energy of the portable devices are limited. Data broadcast has become an excellent method for efficient data dissemination. In this paper, the problem for generating a broadcast program of a set of data items with the associated access frequencies on multiple channels is explored. In our approach, a minimal expected average access time of the broadcast data items is first derived. The broadcast program is then generated, which minimizes the minimal expected average access time. Simulation is performed to compare the performance of our approach with two existing approaches. The result of the experiments shows that our approach outperforms others and is in fact close to the optimal.