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Comment by atchoo | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. My faith in the BBC's commitment to decentralisation and open standards has been damaged by the artificial month delay they added to their podcast feeds to try and drive traffic to their centralised Sounds app. I've been listening to the In Our Time podcast for 20 years and then they go and vandalise it as a growth hack. There is no way I am using multiple proprietary podcast apps so I end up listening to topical comedy a month out of date... which is just weird.

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I feel like BBC Sounds is some senior manager's vanity project that they have staked their career on.

Their obsession with trying to get me to use it instead of normal RSS feeds or third party radio services like TuneIn is incredibly frustrating. They have intentionally broken the experience for smart speaker users and podcast listeners because they are incapable of enticing them over with a better experience. The obsession with control has soured my feelings towards BBC radio.

I feel the same about Radio France (the radio public broadcaster here in France, equivalent to BBC Radio + BBC Sounds). They've been pushing their app more and more, and now RSS feeds correctly list the episodes, but if you try to download one from a few months ago you just get an ad to download the app. No thanks.

Does Radio France generate revenues in other French-speaking countries with the same content? It feels like the BBC is trying to maximise revenue but expectations for consumers locally and overseas are going to be very different. Blocking loopholes hurts the local users more.

French public broadcasters are ad-supported, they don't have to separate local and overseas websites/apps/revenue logic. I've seen another comment about the BBC having ads for other BBC content; I already get ads in my Radio France podcasts (just the one before the proper content), and they're dynamic, so they surely change them depending on where you listening to maximize revenue. Probably the same type of dynamic advertising I get when listening to US podcasts with inverted French-speaking ads.

The Rock feed by Radio France is among my favorites online music radios. I don't use smartphones and don't like to keep a browser running just to listen to music, so I extracted the URL and use it into whichever player I have available.

https://stream.radiofrance.fr/fiprock/fiprock_hifi.m3u8

I don't follow the BBC's approaches to revenue generation that closely, but is part of this due to larger overseas audiences? I'm now living outside the UK, so I expect that I'm viewed differently as a user by the Beeb, as well as by TV licence payers. If access to content isn't controlled then it's harder to maximise the revenue.

BBC Sounds feels like it's part of that efforts, but I'd be interested to know more given how much family members complain about the costs of licencing and services relative to the quality.

It's about as self-conscious as you can get, too. You already have an audience for the entertainment products you produce. Out of all the places where you can sneak in a "value add," this is not one of them. As if you're going to out-produce your own creators.

It's audio only entertainment. Just.. go with _that_.

The BBC has to prove it's serving the entire UK. An anonymous RSS doesn't allow that.

It's frustrating, but it's also inevitable from such a hostile environment.

“Inevitable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this comment

Inevitable in that people in charge of the BBC want to prove that people (specifically an appropriate cross-section of the British public) use the BBC to keep the funding secure

They could do that by entering the 21st century and having an IP-locked subscription system.

How does that get them subscription estimates?

Then they can make sure people in the UK have a subscription account.

Because every house has a single, unchangeable IP...?

You clearly never worked in an ISP.

I definitely did not work at an ISP. But what I said doesn't require a static IP per house. Just GeoIP so non-UK residents are treated differently (unless they VPN).

The target is not to determine whether the client is in the UK, but whether the client is a specific license-payer or at a specific address. GeoIP doesn't help to get either of those datapoints.

Enforced by a proprietary app?

Yes, called iPlayer[0].

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

Or Sounds which is basically the audio version of iplayer

No; inevitable is a claim, not a support.

I don't think it's that.

The real problem is that the BBC must be in a position whereby, should the government decide to link TV license and BBC access in a hard way, or (god forbid) fully privatise the service, they can flip a switch and make it so. So everything has to be behind a registration wall.

They have been under 13 years of pressure from Tory governments, run by friends of Murdoch, who don't believe in free knowledge and public broadcasting; the BBC had to be seen to go in the general direction of preparing for de-facto privatisation. This is the result.

The BBC has a history of fighting that -- when ITV Digital collapsed, the BBC was quickly out of the gates to get DTT decoders with no CAM modules as the norm.

I think they missed a trick by not getting into the open HDMI dongle market, letting companies like Amazon take the initiative. We now see the result of those non-open platforms (amazon taking 30% of income as a platform provider etc), but with government interference as it is (remember it was Labour that stopped the BBC building an international streaming service back in 2009) I can see why.

> remember it was Labour that stopped the BBC

A New Labour government run by friends of Murdoch. You can guess the constant there.

They really jumped the shark when they made you have to sign in to the BBC News app. I uninstalled it and just decided to use my browser, and guess what, I now read the BBC less, so well done. But then I know I'm not the typical person on the street, so unfortunately this probably did yield a lot of new sign ups, under duress

I actually quite like BBC sounds but it is completely possible to circumvent it. You might need to look the URL of a show up on there but you can play any show on sounds using `mpv <URL>`

I also use that method to listen to live radio:

    alias bbc1='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_one.m3u8'

    alias bbc1x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_1xtra.m3u8'

    alias bbc2='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_two.m3u8'

    alias bbc3='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_three.m3u8'

    alias bbc4='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_fourfm.m3u8'

    alias bbc5='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live.m3u8'

    alias bbc5x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live_sports_extra.m3u8'

    alias bbc6='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_6music.m3u8'

In the early days you could get the summary of The Archers episodes for the week in advance by twiddling the URL.... At some point they got wise to it, and they might get wise to this too.

If they lock their internet streams to their app, that'd kick themselves off of internet radio appliances, so it may not be feasible.

(they did shut down their MP3 streams this year though, which probably did that to some older ones)

The main appliances (Google, Amazon) already go through a pre-installed BBC app to serve their content.

The much-missed Beeb-O-Tron[0] used to have a function to do this called the "Beebobodge"[1], given any timeslot in the week. Nowadays I use Radiofeeds[2] to get live URL stream links which I play through Transmission on Android or VLC on PC.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100402115118/http://beebotron....

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100408073914/http://beebotron....

[2] http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/

I have get_iplayer [0] set up to download the topical comedy as it comes out and put it into a Podcast addict virtual podcast folder. Suits my needs.

I would use Sounds, but the UI is actually really fiddly to get to where I need to go, you can "subscribe" but you can't have playlists or queues. It's just a bit rubbish all round.

[0] https://get-iplayer.github.io/get_iplayer/

I ended up rube-goldberging get_iplayer outputs into a proper podcast feed and thence into Pocket Casts with the rest of my podcasts. It sort of mostly works.

Every time I hear the BBC Sounds jingle - "Music, radio, podcasts" - I think of the show W1A where they referred to the the "Department for Culture, Media and Sport" as the "Department for Culture, Media and For Some Reason Sport".

"Music, radio, and for some reason podcasts" is much more fitting.

While I agree the delay is a killer for topical news/comedy content, it's hard to argue the same for In Our Time. In Our Time is the only show I regularly listen to in podcast form.

In recent weeks they've started inserting interstitial ads for other BBC content at random points inside In Our Time.

"How can they do that, the show is an uninterrupted 45 minutes of talking" you might ask. Well, they just insert it at a random point somewhere, possibly halfway through a sentence. It's both very annoying and amateurish.

I don't know if this applies to your circumstance, but w.r.t. those m3u8 urls posted elsewhere: I have found that a lot of systems will cheerfully reference the ad-break content on some rando spammy looking domain in the middle of their otherwise sane #EXTM3U format making it cheap to just block them and the player skips over it

My suspicion is that is how uBlock Origin is able to make the YT ads magically disappear without otherwise blowing up the content stream

For IoT the one actual pain-point is that if an episode generates online discussion then I can't participate but it's mainly a complaint about the user-hostile attempt to make the podcast feed an inferior second class citizen.

It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad really.

I'm surprised they even have those feeds at all. I presumed their days were numbered when Sounds came out. It's not just them, a lot of podcasts seem to really not want you to use their plain old RSS feed, instead hiding it behind collapsable segments and similar. I guess they get more metrics (and maybe money) if you use Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever. Then of course there are the ones with outright exclusivity deals

It's a shame because RSS podcasts are naturally distributed (probably because they date from back when that was the default mode of the web). No need to bow down to someone else's content rules - if you have a domain and the ability to host some fairly small files, you can have a podcast which can be loaded into thousands of apps across all platforms with no central authority

I'd also take that as a lesson to some younger people getting into decentralization afresh and thinking it requires heavyweight federation. You don't necessarily need a complicated protocol and your servers talking to each other. Just standard client interfaces and then the client can do the aggregation with distribution as a natural property, like the web

A number of BBC podcasts set their rss url to http:// instead of https://. One can still get these feeds over https/443 (see below). But podcast apps will try to use http/80 of course.

Why does BBC do this. Or maybe it's the podcast apps that do it. Weird.

"In Our Time" is one example.

   printf 'GET /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \
   |nc -vvn 125.252.212.113 80 > 1.rss

   printf 'GET /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \
   |openssl s_client -connect 125.252.212.113:443 -ign_eof > 1.rss

Technically it only supports http in spec https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29985571/w3c-validator-s...

TIL. In experiments I have run, most feeds use https.

There seems to have been a political attack against BBC comedy, which honestly was doing great work at raising awareness of political mischief and helping to shine a light on government wrongdoing and corruption.

The killing off of "Mock the Week" around the same time that free BBC radio comedy was forcibly dissociated from the news cycle just seems suspicious. And we know that BBC management has been loaded with Tory faithful, it stinks.

In Our Time is an absolute tour de force. Bragg just brings such an enlightened academic curiosity to so varied a corpus of subjects. It's a delight to follow along in the wake of him and his guests.

There are multiple BBCs; the commercial arm ruins everything.

Me too.

From Brexit to ruining IoT was when I decided I would no longer consider myself British. My citizenship is just be a piece of trivia now.

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