BBC Radio's Streaming Changes Leave Long-Time Listeners In the Lurch

New submitter grandrollerz writes: Despite streaming online since the RealAudio days of the late 1990s, the BBC has announced that most of its radio stations will become unavailable to international users later this year. Starting in Spring 2025, only talk news stations BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 will remain accessible outside the UK. This change is due to rights issues and the launch of a new BBC audio website and app that will replace BBC Sounds for international users. The BBC Sounds app will be available exclusively to UK audiences, although UK users traveling abroad for short periods will still be able to use it. This move has disappointed many long-time international listeners who will lose access to their favorite BBC radio stations. It follows a similar move to further commercialize its services where in 2024 the BBC and Amazon Music struck a global deal to make BBC podcasts available on Amazon Music outside the UK, but only for subscribers to Amazon's Prime and Amazon Music Unlimited services.

How will they enforce this?

[jenningsthecat]

The BBC Sounds app will be available exclusively to UK audiences

A VPN should take care of the location problem; and if the app is available on Android then it will probably end on a zillion APK-hosting sites and will be easy to sideload. It seems unlikely that an "app" will be needed for desktop / laptop users. So except for iPhone users, I'm guessing this will be more of an inconvenience than a roadblock.

I suppose a lot of Android users don't know about sideloading, so for a while ignorance will be in the Beeb's favour. But as more and more of this lockdown crap occurs, more and more users will be looking for ways around it, and either will become more tech savvy or will make friends with those who are.

This is just another flavour of DRM, and as such it will be bypassed.

Re:

[ldephil]

The BBC is fairly aggressive with their VPN detection for iPlayer, so I would expected them to employ as much effort on the radio side, given that they're actively shutting the rest of the world out. It's something of a shame given how much soft power these kinds of things bring more generally, but fewer and fewer organizations can see beyond the end of their nose, it seems.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC's budget has been repeatedly cut, and this content is (mostly) not their original content, it's content they have to pay royalties for.

I'm not quite sure why anyone should think the BBC should pay large amounts of royalties to predominantly US entertainment megacorps for the privilege of providing (e.g.) US citizens with a free service, paid for on their behalf by UK license payers. Seems pretty bizarre to me.

Re:

[ldephil]

If it were simply about money, they likely could have found a path via one of their commercial arms (you know they have those, right?) to permit access to their back catalog via a paid service. Or they could use ads (they stuff those into their web sites if someone visits from outside the UK).... That they don't / can't, even for UK citizens temporarily overseas (who paid for a license, but the geolocks still impact them) strikes me as odd. Even someone outside the UK wants to pay the BBC to access their

DRM - Music industry and expats complain....

[johnjones]

DRM is there because the MUSIC industry wants it and wrote it into contracts

the BBC do not hold the rights to all music and video they want to broadcast they have to pay a license they recoup this cost by charging a license fee and by selling the productions they have to the commercial market

the UK cant keep funding expats and others who do not pay a license fee

I expect that expat community will be the most vocal but honestly they dont have a leg or anything else to stand on... they like the rest of the wor

Re:

[Jahta]

a geo block is remarkably effective it also reduces the amount of infrastructure costs therefore allowing more resources for the UK license payer

Yeah, that's part of the problem with streaming. For decades, people in neighbouring countries could (and did) listen to BBC radio stations via good old-fashioned radio broadcast. This didn't require any additional infrastructure in the UK; propagation of broadcast signals did the work. Also, there were no copyright issues; there is a long-standing pan-European legal principle that if it is legal for the broadcaster to broadcast it, then it's legal for the receivers (wherever they are) to receive it.

But the

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

The BBC does block a lot of VPN endpoints.

Re:

[mjwx]

The BBC Sounds app will be available exclusively to UK audiences

A VPN should take care of the location problem; and if the app is available on Android then it will probably end on a zillion APK-hosting sites and will be easy to sideload. It seems unlikely that an "app" will be needed for desktop / laptop users. So except for iPhone users, I'm guessing this will be more of an inconvenience than a roadblock.

I suppose a lot of Android users don't know about sideloading, so for a while ignorance will be in the Beeb's favour. But as more and more of this lockdown crap occurs, more and more users will be looking for ways around it, and either will become more tech savvy or will make friends with those who are.

This is just another flavour of DRM, and as such it will be bypassed.

And the BBC will just be doing the minimum legally required by them. As the BBC licenses content out to other countries, they are often required by these agreements not to compete in those countries. So they'll do the minimum required to met contractual obligations.

Due to the unique way the BBC is funded it, by and large, does not give a shit if the content is protected or not.

I'm currently sitting in Colombia and can usually access my favourite BBC programs like Have I Got News For You hours after be

Re:

[uncle slacky]

You can listen to BBC radio in the UK without paying the licence fee, so why not abroad as well?

Thanks for nothing Tories

[belg4mit]

They aren't in power now, but they set the wheel in motion and have been railing against the BBC for ages

Re: Thanks for nothing Tories

[DodgyGeezer]

Nadine Dorries, former Anti-culture Secretary. She seemed to think that the BBC should be trying to be like Netflix, totally missing that they needed to be sailing on that boat more than 15 years previously and that the Tories had worked to limit and hobble the Beebâ(TM)s commercial activities all that time. Now itâ(TM)s too late. Fucking numpties.

BBCxit

[SillyKONG]

Just that

Probably the right decision; the licence fee HURTS

[Bruce66423]

Allowing the rest of the world to benefit from ALL the BBC's radio channels puts it in competition for music services with many commercial providers, who are likely to do those things just as well without costing the licence fee payer any money. By contrast Radio 4 and World Service offer unique valuable to the rest of the world at probably little extra cost compared with doing it just for domestic listeners.

The BBC is at present funded by a set fee for all households which have a TV. In addition if you acc

Re:Probably the right decision; the licence fee HU

[Anonymous Coward]

An alternative needs to be adopted as the real cost of the licence fee has risen a lot over the years because the scale of the BBC's offerings have massively increased; something has got to give.

Provably false. Maybe you should give a bit less credence to the right-wing media's anti-BBC agenda and lies. Sadly, we now live in a world where people will believe the complete opposite to reality because it "fits the agenda".

In recent years the BBC's license fee has been cut pretty drastically in real terms and many services have been scaled back.

There's a nice table linked in the article below, with the inflation adjusted cost of a license in 2023 prices shown in square brackets.

This shows that in 2023 prices, the license fee peaked at around £240 p.a.in the 2005-2009 era and has been cut by about 30% in real terms since then.

It also shows that the license fee, again in 2023 prices, is around the lowest point it's been in the last fifty plus years.

So only *two* years in this table, going back to 1968, when the colour TV license was first introduced, show a lower 2023 adjusted license fee than the current one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

TLDR: The BBC license fee is now at an historic *low*, not an historic *high*.

Great

[hcs_$reboot]

I'll keep not listening to the BBC then.

Well That Sucks

[rsmith-mac]

I remember when the Beeb was still experimenting with various forms of radio streaming. They were one of the first groups to try out OGG Vorbis, and even though they didn't stick with it, their R&D efforts contributed a lot to the development and success of Vorbis overall.

More importantly, I didn't think there would be a day where you wouldn't be able to stream BBC Radio online. Even 25 years later, I still enjoy poking the Radio 1 stream now and then just to see what weird and hip stuff they're running

I'll pay if the option is there

[dr_blurb]

I'll happily pay a monthly fee if this means I can use iplayer and sounds

How about shortwave

[FudRucker]

I listen to the BBC on shortwave from 10:00 utc/gmt to 12:00 utc/gmt on 9580 the 31 meter band, i know some NPR college stations play BBC news for an hour a day,

Re:

[uncle slacky]

BBC World Service will still be available online outside the UK.

Great for dictators and wannabe-dictators

[formfeed]

In WW2 Germans secretly listened to the BBC to get the real News on how the war was going. And the best propaganda the BBC could broadcast was the truth. I'll leave the comparison to present day media politics as exercise to the reader.