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Comment by noneeeed | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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

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_.

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