I would like to know how much money this is bringing in for the BBC compared to the amount of international goodwill they’re just setting on fire https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250207-bbc-podcasts-are-now-available-on-the-bbc-website-and-app

this calls for some

@dpk wait i don't follow are you implying that they're losing goodwill by starting a podcasts site?

or do you mean other ways they're losing goodwill (gaza coverage etc)

@mossfet Aiui the intention is that you can no longer listen to BBC radio (live or on demand, with some exceptions) if you live outside the UK

@dpk ohhhh wait yeah i didn't read properly

wow that's really annoying

@mossfet I can no longer use the normal BBC radio website to listen later (it claims episodes are available but just goes to 404 if I click on any of the links)

@dpk fun fact: in the UK in order to watch TV legally you need to own a "TV license", which funds the BBC

so the BBC isn't funded from subscription fees or whatever, its funded by a state-granted legal requirement to pay them or otherwise you can't watch even non-BBC TV

this is also required to watch any kind of BBC content on youtube. like if i were to watch doctor who clips on youtube i'd need to get a license

what

@mossfet Yeah, but it’s never been a requirement to have a TV licence to listen to radio; even before TV licensing existed, the corporation was funded by a tax on radios at the point of purchase, not by an ongoing licence fee

@mossfet They’ve been shuffling towards this for a while (there was never access to 320 kbps feeds outside the UK; a year or two ago they added (local language) advertising to BBC Sounds when listening abroad; now this)

Radio 4 appears to still be listenable through the new website; I sincerely hope they don’t intend to spoil my Christmas Eve by interrupting Nine Lessons and Carols with ad breaks (I haven’t tried listening for long enough yet to see if there are)

@dpk ah the UK managed to broker itself another great deal I see! 😂

@mossfet I mean, I hope they’re not crass enough to insert ad breaks into a religious service, but this is 2025; in so many other ways we have already passed the point of The Simpsons’ hyperbole of the 1990s

@dpk

Soft power? What's that?

@dpk @mossfet

there was never access to 320 kbps feeds outside the UK

This isn’t true. When I was in Norway in July I was using the 320kbps worldwide HLS streams. I use this script for listening to BBC radio stations: https://paste.sr.ht/~noisytoot/baadc025381a8083b7d01822a7d58b8c3e465913

@noisytoot Are you sure it was actually 320 kbps? What used to happen is that the URLs for 320 kbps worked but the actual content was only 128 kbps

@dpk I just tested now with mpv --term-status-msg='${audio-bitrate}' proxying via a server in Germany and it’s definitely 320 kbps

@noisytoot Interesting, thanks

@dpk @mossfet I went to an exhibition on radio at the National Museum of Wales a couple of years ago. IIRC there was a period of time about a decade or two long where the requirement for a 'radio licence' (needed to operate any kind of radio receiver) overlapped with TV broadcasting being operational. So not quite the same thing, but it seems as if the 'radio licence' just morphed into the 'TV licence' and from that point onwards audio-only radio has just been ignored in the legislation.