BBC Sounds - and BBC domestic music radio - going away internationally?
Back in November, I wondered aloud what the BBC was playing at when it came to its BBC Sounds app. It wasn’t promoted internationally, didn’t always work well, but the BBC were hard at work restricting access to its podcasts.
In that blog post, I made a guess at a potential strategy:
Like BBC iPlayer, BBC Sounds will (at some point) not be available internationally. We’ll be left with the BBC World Service (possibly within the main BBC app), and the podcast output “wherever we get our BBC podcasts” - available everywhere, with ads, and without time delays.
When we lose access to BBC Sounds, we’ll also - by and large - lose access to the BBC’s domestic radio stations. Those only exist internationally because they’ve always been available that way - but they cost money to stream overseas, and the music rights amnesty they enjoy goes away as soon as the BBC starts commercialising the streams.
The BBC has since been making a flurry of announcements about new advertising partners in different parts of the world, and new technology, surrounding its podcasts. It’s also made lots of noise, rightfully, about the BBC Premium Podcasts channel in Apple Podcasts. This is good. I don’t pay for the BBC. I want it to earn money, from advertising or from premium podcast subscriptions.
Today, quietly, an announcement has been made on the BBC.com “future” website. It might be visible here in the UK, but it might not be, so just in case, I reproduce it below.
It looks like:
a) “Due to rights limitations, not all BBC content can be made available to international users. This includes BBC music radio stations as well as some podcasts.” - we seem to keep BBC Radio 4 (hurray) and BBC World Service. No BBC Radio 5 Live, if I read this correctly; or BBC Radio 4 Extra.
b) And, about BBC Sounds (which is mentioned at the bottom of this article) - it’s not overtly clear that it will close, but this certainly reads like it will.
On the international BBC website, there’ll apparently be a new product called “Audio”. Except… this announcement appears to have gone early; since clicking the “Audio” link on the website dumps international users into BBC Sounds on .co.uk right now (complete with BBC Radio 1, etc): so perhaps all hasn’t yet been launched. I believe the words “rolling out” are missing; normally you’d expect this to roll out over a few weeks before a proper official launch. Perhaps the open world of RSS has made this visible before it was official - I saw the announcement in the RSS feed reader that I use for Podnews news aggregation. Shows my keywords are set well!
Later: I think it’s supposed to link here: https://www.bbc.com/audio. And, yes: just two radio stations (World Service and Radio 4); a “continue listening” rail which seems to contain some shows I may have listened-to, and plenty of BBC podcasts. I can’t get BBC Radio 4 to play, and nor is there any catch-up radio facility - either on the World Service or on Radio 4. (Yet?)
