BBC podcasts on third-party apps
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Frankly, I think this is a monopolist tactic from Google and it should result in government investigations but I have no hope that will happen. Nice to know people like the BBC have the balls to say no to this though.
But why? I don't see a financial motivator here, unless there is some long-game that I'm not aware of. In theory, driving users to websites in a search result is likely just going to make Google more money from displaying ads.
The only thing I can currently think of is they actually are trying to improve the user experience.
This is the company that decides shades of blue by conversion numbers.
Maybe they indirectly want to 'improve user experience' (so you're less likely to leave) but it's not their terminal value.
Why would it be more profitable to send users to the BBC website?
If you listen via Google they not only know what you listened to but for how long you listened, which parts you skipped over or stopped listening at, and whether you listened to the ads or not. All that information has value to them. Being able to say these people googled your product within 72 hours of hearing your ad on these podcasts is very valuable.
1. You see a podcast you're interested in
2. You go to the BBC's website
3. You discover you need to download BBC Sounds (if in the UK)
4. You download the app
5. You register with a username and password (and UK postcode, which narrows you down to the street where you live)
6. You press play and start listening
or
1. You see a podcast you're interested in
2. You press play and start listening
Wouldn't anyone prefer #2? Including the BBC's programme makers?
I'm a non-UK listener and use the BBC Sounds app all the time. The only thing that's unavailable are program downloads.
Unless you're side-loading on Android, which is perfectly possible too, but that's not quite "being available".
They're splitting it into "Google Podcasts" and "YouTube Music"
Not only a great podcast app, but it respects your Freedom. It's the only thing I miss about not having a smartphone.
In the UK how do you compete for news eyeballs and try and make it pay when the BBC news is for free?
Imagine your business is weather forecasting, the same applies.
Then there is the small matter of the license fee. Most people just pay it out of fear of being caught by one of the legendary detector vans. But you can't have a TV or a monitor that also does TV without being hassled for the rest of your days.
It is getting that way online. I only listen to the BBC on DAB radio, if I sign in to their player thing I know I can't trust myself not to watch some lame series on iPlayer meaning I will have to pay up.
The BBC has an important propaganda role in informing the national conversation and keeping British people British. I am not saying that cynically, that is what the voice of empire is there for. They aren't trying to sell you product, it is more subtle than that, essentially propaganda though, controlling the latitude of available thinking.
They need to be more careful about closing down their reach as people like me go off-piste and start listening to stuff that would never make it onto the BBC. Once you have done that and realise the world thinks differently to the allowed BBC viewpoints there is no going back.
I don't see this as the BBC standing up to the monopolistic evil Google, I also think the BBC are not whiter than white.
They used to send a postage paid envelope, and you could return their "you're a criminal" letter indicating that in fact their supposition was incorrect.
Now, they don't include an envelope IIRC, certainly not postage, so you have to pay [a small amount] every time they decide to accuse you falsely of being a criminal. I'm against that in principle.
So, I thought, I'll waste my own time and go online and fill out the form ... except they demand additional PII from you. Which I'm not happy about giving to Capita, and shouldn't need to, name and address should be sufficient for the legal purposes here.
Thus, we're left waiting for them to make the next move. Which they did, they sent someone around: I stated we didn't watch broadcast TV and don't need a license. They went away.
So, that's the end of it, right?
Nope, they sent two people the next time, who asked for my wife (clue: license fee is payable against premises), didn't show ID, nor identify themselves in any way. When asked they said they "needed to come in" to check we didn't have a TV, they have no need to and no legal right of access [without a warrant]. When I made the same statement as before "we don't need a license ..., not using your services" they threatened "we'll just keep coming".
Great huh.
What really grates with me is that you have to register your details to even use the services on iPlayer now, so they would see clearly at the BBC end that we've stopped using their service.
So, they presumably will continue to waste money until we get an injunction against them for hassling us.
That said, I still support the licence fee. Eventually they'll require your licence number for iPlayer and then they'll probably be able to cut back on the annoying spam.
The BBC does. Thus giving them plenty of opportunities to upset just about everyone.
* Cut funding for a public service
* Wait for the quality of that service to inevitably go down
* Say that it's terrible due to needless government bureaucracy
* Privatise it
No, I'm sure a lot pay because having a good public service is important, even more in this day and age, compared to the Murdoch owned media you get in the UK.
Of course the BBC isn't perfect, but it doesn't mean there's nothing to appreciate.
If I had the option of not paying and losing access to BBC channels, I probably would. I'd miss Doctor Who but they only do that every few years now.
For a long time the Met Office had their private arm. So if ITV et al. get the private version of the Met Office and the BBC have the Met Office then it can be hard to get in to that business.
A lot of things that make sense with a state ownership model of the economy fall apart when you have things like 'producers choice' or the Met Office expected to make a buck in the private sector.
Ultimately though there are two sources for weather information and it comes down to who gets the observations data and who has the super computers. In the USA they have the public/private model right. The government has the computer and the data is available for free. In the UK (the only other place with the observations/supercomputer combo) the idea is to make money off it in this weird privatised state business sector that the Met Office finds itself in.
The internet makes the data a commodity of sorts, who knows where it comes from and how accurate it really is. In the olden days of regional TV you would have actual forecasters who knew their area. Imagine you have a lake in the Alps and the computer gives you the data for the mountain top for the town by the lake below. The nearest observations come from the airport on the other side of the lake. A professional forecaster who knows the observations for that town would be able to work it out properly and have an informed guess for the town, and hack the model accordingly.
The BBC and other broadcasters have stepped away from having that aspect of local TV with the human aspect of a quality weather forecast. I guess it matters not if the observation data is getting better.
All other services (Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple, etc.) serve podcasts on their own properties but if Google does it it's monopolistic. To me such claims about Google have become too overused and have lost their meaning.
I don't blame BBC though for sticking to their guns because they really want user analytics and think have the weight to pull out. The justification they provided is just misleading.
The BBC already have all the consumption data that they would expect - IP address, device, time listened, etc - in their own server logs. Just like a normal podcast player.
So... what user analytics do the BBC actually want?
There's a standard NPR have written to improve this, but it requires the podcast players to implement it. It's very privacy-respecting but I doubt Apple will implement it, so it's probably going to be a non-starter unless the big podcasters like the BBC hold the line.
For Google Podcasts, "downloaded" = "listened", since it has no auto-download feature. So they are (excepting the minority who manually download) actual listens.
You remind me that I should add a sniffer for RAD support in my Podnews pages, so I'll go and do that. My own podcast has RAD tags in it.
Most on HN May be familiar with this already but Podcasts are completely open and a creator simply publishes an RSS that they then provide to a podcast App such as iTunes so it can appear on the Apple podcast app. In exchange most of these podcast apps share any listen counts and analytics with the owner of the Podcast. However, almost always the files are hosted by the owner so the plays could also likely be counted that way. Even the artwork and everything is provided with this RSS that is completely open.
More and more platforms are popping up creating “exclusive” podcasts and trying to close the ecosystem down. Not sure if that’s what is happening here, it’s unclear from the article, but just think Podcasts are one of those last few technically open things on the internet and that’s great.
They are so open in fact I was planning on adding them to my audio App I’ve been building which lets people listen to any article right now. The more this closes up the less of an opportunity for people to create useful things and for people to find new ways to stay informed.
As a shameless self promotion if your interested in having articles read to you on the go try my app https://articulu.com
It already is happening, some podcasts on BBC Sounds are exclusive to BBC Sounds (albeit for a time limited period)
To suggest that Google trying to muscle into the podcast space by leveraging their search engine to direct people not to the podcast feed but to their own service is in any way equivalent to small creators adding value to their listeners by providing exclusive content is absurd to say the least.
Since I vehemently despise ads I have no issues with the subscription model as long as it remains convenient to play the audio any way I feel like (i.e. no intrusive DRM).
So I actually think that's a good evolution overall, I wish more of the internet moved away from ads and towards other monetization models.
For your audio app I suppose that it'll mean that you'll have to strike a deal with the podcast platforms to share some of the revenue or figure out an API to let people use their license keys on third party players. I understand that it's annoying but that sounds perfectly fair to me.
The podcasts are available for free, but funded by ads, or you can subscribe to the premium feed where the ads are edited out.
Yeah premium podcasts are already a thing. There's no need to "figure out an API to let people use their license keys on third party players", it's simply HTTP Basic authentication embedded in the URL. Should work just about anywhere.
> a more closed platform
> convenient to play the audio any way I feel like (i.e. no intrusive DRM)
For instance with audio in general, we've seen lots of pushes toward streaming rather than downloading, which allows the platform to control when, where, and how people listen.
I love the trend toward premium versions of things that are ads free, if I don’t want to be tracked and have annoying ads I should have that option. I think the internet overall would be a much better place if every service offered this.. pay for the service and escape the ads madness.
Totally agree on the rev share as well and I think that should be democratized much more so.. it should be possible for things to remain open as well as for creators to get paid
I think the issue is that you put the emphasis on “exclusive” instead of “podcasts”.
If it isn’t delivered over an RSS feed that I can subscribe to in my podcast player of choice, it’s not a podcast.
Would all it take to convince you that a podcast can delivered via something other than RSS, say ActivityPub, be your preferred client supporting it?
Calling some thing that is not playable in my podcast app and doesn’t use the same protocols as my other podcasts, isn’t a podcast. No more than a Word Doc is a web page.
I expect to be able to subscribe to a podcast using my podcast player via RSS.
You mean like TV shows? And radio shows? And newspaper comics?
Saying that podcasts have to be consumed via RSS is like saying that TV must be delivered via cable.
Would you say a Word document is a web page?
Funny enough, while HNers always complain about Apple’s “walled garden”, the Apple podcast player subscribes directly to the host’s RSS feed. Once you subscribe to a podcast, Apple’s servers are no longer involved.
Additionally, I do use bandwidth as my rough listener metric, so letting it be hosted by Google Podcasts would impact that significantly. Which is closer to the concern the BBC seems to have.
This was even mentioned to you roughly a month ago by someone else:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19287119
Didn't seem to have much of a lasting impact on you.
The radio shows used to be downloadable without the songs due to license constraints. I'm guessing Sounds allows them via some kind of DRM to include music, but even at 28 days they time-out for me within the app a little too fast.
Ooh, it's kind of surprising. Discovery is still clunky. Getting from website to subscribed can be clunky. It's not interactive or conversational. Advertising is tricky. Podcasters generally have to negotiate deals separately. There are no clicks and podcasters can't really do the ad targeting that makes most online ads valuable. There isn't a deep analysis of pauses and abandons, like in google.
OTOH, there are no content policies. No "demonetization." No spying on consumers. No clickbait. No seo... and for the most part no rulers.
Even the clunkiness of discovery is half-feature. You ask friends what they listen to, and that mode of slow-and steady distribution makes for better incentives.
Meanwhile, Google and the like look at podcasts and see a piece of unclaimed territory like late stage empires and an island that wasn't worth bothering with 100 years previously.
Podcasts remind me of fanzines. Which is a great thing.
> We also want to make our programmes and services as good as they can possibly be - this means us getting hold of meaningful audience data.
They claim it's because they're a public service and need to know what the public want, but there are other ways, and I'm torn on if it's a legit case or not. NPR has been trying to up use of NPR One for what I assume are similar reasons, but haven't gone the way of shutting out listening sources yet. Instead, they propose a standards [0] to do it from the listeners, and it's showing no signs of success.
0. https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-extra/2018/12/11/675250553/...
The purpose is to have a wide variety of material to listen to in my car (via Bluetooth) in which I do not have a data connection.
There was a play for a new podcasting standard by I think Gimlet (or one of them big companies in the space), that let you have user identifiers, inject ads based on whatever at different times, and send tracking messages at different times. I listened to an interview with the guy who makes Overcast and he basically said there's no reason any podcast app except theirs would want to support that, so I guess owning your own app for your own content is really the only way to get those analytics if you want them.
I can understand older items in the back catalogue needing to be removed, but for most shows now the standard contract should include "and presented on iPlayer in perpetuity". I don't know why they'd commission a new children's show, for example, and not include such a clause?
"What we think is important is pretty simple. We want people to have easy access to the wide range of BBC programmes, not just a select few, and be able to discover and listen to new ones really easily."
Cutting off your audience potential to understand your audience better is some kind of broken logic. The comments section highlights that their own audience generally does not accept their reasoning.
This surely means Google are in a position to eat any apps lunch if they choose to. If Google couldn't release a product and have that hit the top 3 [on Android] in a few months then they have some serious problems; they'd have to majorly mess up their design or functionality, by not bothering to look at the metrics.
Now of course Google might choose to make something "innovative", but at least as far as which functions to include, and what people using podcast apps like, they're starting with a major advantage.
They're not. Apple Podcasts is the most popular podcast client, followed by... Spotify I believe, then 'other'.
> Talking to Podnews, a BBC spokesperson said that Google is required to sign a licence to link to their podcasts; and that the Distribution Policy also requires Google to supply user data to the BBC. There has been a “consultation with Google”, and the BBC “has no choice but to stop Google from making podcasts available via Google products.”
> However, Ofcom, the UK media regulator, requires that “the BBC must offer the public services to third parties in response to reasonable requests for supply, except where the BBC has an objective justification for not doing so. In offering the public services for supply, and in supplying those services, the BBC must act on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.” (¶3.3.2).
> In recent months, the BBC have been removing some of its podcasts from third-party platforms, and placing them exclusively within their BBC Sounds app. BBC podcasts are supported by advertising outside the UK, though BBC Sounds remains unavailable to non-UK listeners.
(Also an ex-beeb employee)
I tried the BBC Sounds app, once I learnt about their intention to phase-out the excellent standalone iPlayer Radio app. The sound quality was markedly worse for live radio and coupled with a haphazard UI/UX - the app just got deleted. Also, there is no dearth of apps to consume podcasts e.g. I use the native Podcasts app on iOS and Deezer/Spotify on Android. BBC Sounds does not bring anything new or radical to the table.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/bbc-sounds-iplayer-radio-pod...
https://podnews.net/article/bbc-blocks-google
So why are they calling out Google specifically? And what results would they prefer?
If you don't have Apple Podcasts installed, you won't get any search results for "Apple Podcasts" (I tested this). And if you have another podcast player installed that supports iPhone-wide search (e.g. Overcast), you will get search results from that other podcast player.
This seems to me to be quite different from the Google search, which (from what I understand from the articles) always seems to link to Google Podcasts if you are using it on Android.
I find this story quite confusing.
Google have smooshed their player into google web search results so that you will probably visit Google’s podcast player instead of going to the content producer’s website.
Apple: normal podcast player app.
Google: abusing their search monopoly.
(The Archers is a long running (since 1951!) BBC Radio 4 soap opera about a fictional farming community. There are a lot of people addicted to this, including the wife.)
I had to avert this disaster as a wife with no Archers isn't worth contemplating, so I installed the BBC sounds app instead. It was my thought that the BBC pulled the content from google to get people using the BBC Sounds app instead.
The BBC Sounds app works, but it is a pretty terrible podcast app (2.2/5 stars on the Google Play store), it doesn't download and queue things, or let you order them etc.
And the "Why do I need to sign in?" page is evasive. Why is it compulsory? What are they hiding?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/help/how-to-guides/sign-in/acc...
And this "Why" page doesn't even make an effort.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/usingthebbc/why-we-are-asking-you-to-s...
I don't think there's some secret conspiracy. I am a great supporter of the BBC.
But the way "TV Licensing" behaves (operated by a Capita) is so breathtakingly and openly dishonest and opaque, there is no trust left.
Is that going?
A new program being forced down listeners ears
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jan/20/bbc-sounds-app...
.... One typically indignant fan, Nigel Metheringham, tweeted: “Bring back (the podcast) #Fortunately to an open feed, rather than using it to prop up a shoddy service.”
The loss of this favourite podcast to anyone who downloads from other sites, such as iTunes, or for listeners living abroad, has now exposed much wider dissatisfaction with BBC Sounds, which is receiving low scores on app-rating sites. Criticism focuses on the lack of a sleep-timer function for Android devices, a failure to reliably display track names, the difficulty of sharing content, on claims the search function is ineffective, and on the limited menu of content from other podcast providers.
....
Just let me download the fricken MP3, I don't need some stupid ad plagued spyware to listen to a podcast. I realise sometimes this can be about monetising your content to help pay for production costs. But you know what? I'm happy to pay, and already do to some folks via Patreon/Paypal etc. Just don't force me to jump through hoops to eventually locate the raw MP3 that I can listen to on my own terms.
If Android users can't choose independent software to listen to podcasts that's too bad.
(It uses the iTunes database apparently)
As of 9:20 Eastern, I don't yet see the second release of BBC global news that I would expect to see for yesterday, which does not bode well.
If you take away RSS, it's not even a podcast anymore.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/26/18282436/bbc-podcasts-goo...
EDIT: Here's the robots.txt file:
https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/robots.txt?utm_source=podn...
Additionally, the podnews article linked in other comments indicates this is just a trick with robots.txt, and does not appear to impact the actual function of the podcast.
Podcasts are great because they're essentially open and standardized, and I can sync them with bloated desktop programs like iTunes, FOSS programs like Antennapod, or even command-line interfaces like Newsboat. DRM and arbitrary gating of media behind proprietary technologies just makes it worse and blocks it off from so many people.
Antenna pod -- https://antennapod.org/
Google play page -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.danoeh.ante...
Github -- https://github.com/antennapod/AntennaPod
It uses RSS and open standards, has all of the podcast playing features like 2x speed, sleep timer auto download etc.
Not "IT'S" (pronoun + verb)
I sympathise with their decision, but it doesn't seem a very joined up one.
Additionally, I fully support the move that the BBC made.
Why would anyone do that?
They say it quite clearly in the article. They want to collect personal data from users.
>podcast players
I assume so they can easily censor podcasts they disagree with politically. There was a big scandal a few months ago with several large sites removing access to Infowars podcasts simultaneously.
At the end of the day, it's all about having more control over users.