> Reach has been growing and only a small proportion of listening is online. However, we should heed the lessons of other industries and change before we have to.
I too have been wondering how long podcasts will remain using RSS before being utterly demolished by paid for platforms.
Can you imagine if we had TV content shared over RSS? Actually pirates have distributed content through RSS for a long time and it was a much better UX than anything offered by the big players.
Good on the BBC for thinking ahead and taking difficult steps to protect consumers.
There's a very simple solution to keeping podcasts free and open: don't buy paywalled content, and don't listen to shows that are "only available on [proprietary app x]!"
I'm going to continue supporting independent, freely-available RSS podcasts through Patreon/direct donation, and you should too. Nothing (short of ISP-level censorship) can make those hundreds of thousands of hours of decentralized, self-hosted content go away.
”pirates have distributed content through RSS for a long time and it was a much better UX than anything offered by the big players.”
Perhaps if viewed through a technical/hacker lens. But platforms like Netflix, Spotify, and iPlayer have been successful at attracting (paying!) users precisely because their UX is so much better.
Better than traditional TV boxes, and also better than the pirate world.
As long as there is only 1 or 2 platforms, which you have to choose and pay for. If there are too many fish in the see and you have to pay for all of them, people will pay for none of them.
Netflix's UX is that it works and there are no ads. Otherwise there are way better UIs out there in the pirate world which actually have features other than "scroll through boxes of images".
I love the Radioplayer and to date I can’t get my head round Sounds. It just hasn’t got the same functionality unless one wants to listen to music. Radio plays, comedies et al are my listening menu. It seems that things are gradually being removed from the iPlayer. I’m old so not important to the new BBC.
This is a legitimate question. They are a special class of organization and have all kinds of policies to work to. A private company can do what they want.
Somebody somewhere has presumably said "we want to know exactly how many people use it"
Lower down they've said "we need more people signed in"
Then lower down that they've decreed "if we force people to sign in, we'll increase the numbers signing in, even if we reduce the total users using the system"
I’m still a iPlayer Radio user and don’t really plan to switch to Sounds anytime soon, due to missing functionality. (I listen to podcasts on the Apple app)
But I haven’t seen anything being removed from iPlayer Radio yet.
BTW - you can find non-music stuff in Categories below the fold on the Sounds app - so there’s Drama, for example.
No more granular categorisation into Crime, Historical etc - which is a shame
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Sounds is utterly terrible. It's really difficult when they push it so much on the radio (ie. minimum 4 times per hour mentioned on radio 6 in the morning. I though, yeah ok then i'll support and give it a go. It's (well, when I tried it a while back) missing casting, an alarm, downloading, and easy way to search and find radio programmes, and a whole heap of other "base" features.
I am genuinely shocked as to why they're pushing it so hard, especially given that the current iplayer radio app is fantastic.
I use iPlayer Radio too, and admittedly I haven’t gotten around to trying BBC Sounds yet.
But one thing iPlayer Radio has never been very good at is content discovery. You really have to know what you’re looking for, where as Netflix or Spotify are pretty good at the “you like these genres, so you’ll love this one!” game.
I believe this personalisation aspect is what BBC are trying to solve with Sounds.
I commented on the BBC website but I might as well post it here too:
As a proud listener, viewer and supporter of the BBC, this is one part that seems really unfortunate. Why should I need an account to listen to BBC content? All the pages on the BBC website that pretend to answer this question are evasive and dodge the question. What do you have to hide?
Please re-consider. Allow your content to be made available via open standards, like some of your podcasts. Let us choose how to consume the content that we fund.
Please let me use whatever device and app I want. I don't use a Google account on my android phone because I value my privacy. That means I can't install the Sounds app. Please let me listen to the BBC without having to have a Google or Apple account.
Please let us listen to radio without being tracked. Trust is already eroded given the evasive wording on your help pages.
Please think of those people in the UK who don't have a post-code (like visitors) or email address (like the elderly).
And please come clean about why you need personal details to listen to the radio.
> Why should I need an account to listen to BBC content?
It doesn't apply to audio of course, but watching BBC video content now requires you to be a licence payer doesn't it? So they need to know who you are. I guess they just extended the system to all content for simplicity.
We don't have radio licenses any more. You don't need a TV license to listen to radio.
> I guess they just extended the system to all content for simplicity.
The 'iPlayer' app (web and native) is entirely different to the 'iPlayer Radio' and 'Sounds' apps. It's not simple to add auth to apps totally unrelated to TV.
Technology serves policy. You don't build anything without a reason.
If they said "our technology platform is cheaper if we track every user's activity and prevent anyone from accessing it without authentication" then at least that would be honest. I think it would raise some very legitimate questions, though.
FWIW I don't think this is the case. You can access BBC Sounds fine from other parts of the world, just with ads inserted. If they can geolocate non-UK listeners to substitute auth for ads, they can geolocate UK listeners without auth or ads.
For the avoidance of doubt, they do not automatically match up TV licences to your BBC iPlayer account. When you go to the website to watch a video, you are redirected to the login page. From there, you are asked whether you have a TV licence, and only then does the video start. I can only assume the forced login is to enable user tracking?
I don't mind paying the TV license fee as the content is excellent, but I browse the website and download what I want to watch with youdube-dl, because I categorically reject their creepy tracking, which they refuse to properly explain. If youtube-dl stops working, I'll keep paying the licence to support the programming, but will look for torrents of the shows to download instead.
> It doesn't apply to audio of course, but watching BBC video content now requires you to be a licence payer doesn't it? So they need to know who you are. I guess they just extended the system to all content for simplicity.
The database for the BBC website logins and the database for people who have a license fee aren't connected, and couldn't be under the Data Protection Act.
The BBC login doesn't check if the information is valid, or if you have a license, it's literally just for user tracking for data.
It's the difference between specific and general monitoring.
The BBC can absolutely take an individual login to iPlayer that they think is suspicious, and have TV licensing determine if that address has a license.
But it is objectively true that you can type in any old nonsense into a BBC account registration and it does not validate it against the License Fee database - that's because moving to a general system of checking is not what that database would be collected for, and would probably not be found to be a proportionate or non-general monitoring and therefore cannot use that exemption.
What? There are tonnes of critics and conspiracy theorists. Look up 'TV licensing' on YouTube. I am not one of those.
I am very grateful that we have Radio 3, 4 and various podcasts. The news is generally balanced and generally of high quality. I think that's reasonable contextualization for the comment.
All media/news organisations have an agenda, but state sponsored ones are especially dangerous.
BBC News is a government mouthpiece, I would rather the UK government didn't have a means to distribute their propaganda directly to my TV or phone or computer under the guise of a "friendly national broadcaster".
The stuff on YouTube is pretty ridiculous, but it did lead me to discover http://www.bbctvlicence.com - an archive of the automated and increasingly aggressive (until the cycle resets) letters TV Licensing inundate non-license holding households with. I've got a personal stack of around 10, I've only lived here half a year.
The BBC doesn't do themselves any favours in winning back non-payees with these tactics.
Its been nearly two months since I started emailing hn@ycombinator.com without a reply. I’ve changed email providers in case it was a spam issue, and still nothing. So, I’m trying this again. Please respond.
I agree. I use RSS to listen to the BBC Global News podcast every morning over breakfast (and NPR, and CBC news updates). As much as I love that part of my morning routine, I wouldn't create an account to listen to it, so I don't see a reason to change from RSS.
I worked at the BBC when this account requirement was rolled out. The idea behind it is honestly about improving the user experience. If you're logged in, they can keep your progress saved across devices (so for iPlayer that means across platforms like Computer, Phone, Xbox etc), and they can learn more about you to promote recommendations on what to watch. People broadly speaking really like this, it's one of the best features of Netflix as an example.
The podcast app I use has this as an option, it's not mandatory. Personally, I wouldn't use it if I had to sign in, syncing is not a feature I care about one bit and I don't need even an ounce of friction between me and "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me." If I had to sign in to listen I'd just turn on the radio or something instead.
If its truly about improving consumer experience its optional. I am not required to login to Chrome or Firefox to use them even though some people find bookmark/history syncing to be useful features.
I don't doubt the good faith of individual implementors such as yourself. But, like the official BBC communications, you fail to address the _compulsory_ nature.
To draw a very apposite analogy, YouTube on Android requires sign-in for minor functionality. There's no 'back' button and you can't bookmark videos for later. The UX is deliberately crippled unless you sign in: clicked video by mistake? Good luck getting back to the previous one.
This is a choice they made. It's not beyond the whit of an Android app to store bookmarks locally and sync them when you sign-in. Or to maintain a history for a back button.
The ostensible reason is "so you can have a uniform experience across all devices". The real reason is "so we can use your data to shift ads". We all know this, and it's part of the Google value proposition. It's free because they exploit your data.
The BBC is something different altogether. It's partly non-profit, has no shareholders, funded in a unique way, and, without wishing to seem mawkish, something special. Emulating commercial SV companies leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth. That combined with the privileged place it holds in public life, is not a nice combination.
Maybe Netflix has some nice features. Maybe the BBC can adopt them. But if they really are for _my_ benefit, let me opt in, don't make it compulsory.
Note I am not arguing this to be true today, but what you are saying is not mutually exclusive to using mandatory logins more nefariously in future. Also, one does not need to force accounts for this - users can decide if they want a login and viewing history - YouTube arguably does this already today. The compulsory part is the real issue, not the benefits it brings.
I’ve sadly seen many many features like this (just watch the industry - who hasn’t?) that are sold under one seemingly positive guise only to be used for another negative one later.
Regardless of public statements on the matter today, I’m really not sure the BBC will resist the temptation longer term to use iPlayer logins as a licence fee enforcement tool among other things, it’s too easy to spin positively as a business decision.
Much of my own unease in all of this is due to the BBC’s odd nature as a kind of hybrid public/private entity. Perhaps the time has come to just let the BBC be a private company and compete directly with Netflix et al, at which point I would care much less about how access is provided. If it is to be a public broadcaster though, I think one of its primary duties should be to be as open as is practical.
>Why should I need an account to listen to BBC content? All the pages on the BBC website that pretend to answer this question are evasive and dodge the question. What do you have to hide?
The BBC's funding is increasingly under threat and the license fee is being used to fund a wide range of non-core and non-BBC services; mandatory logins are a hedge against several risks.
Over-75s are entitled to a free TV license; this was historically funded by government subsidy, but that subsidy will be completely phased out by 2020-21. This will create a revenue shortfall of about £0.5bn, of a total budget of around £4bn.
On the other end of the age spectrum, an increasing proportion of young people are living in TV-less households, making it far easier for them to continue watching BBC programming while evading the license fee.
The BBC is increasingly reliant on international commercial partnerships (most notably the BritBox streaming service) in order to raise revenues, but this is potentially jeopardised by the increasing use of VPN services; GeoIP walls aren't very useful if a large proportion of internet users can choose their IP location with a couple of clicks.
Mandatory logins make a lot of possible future scenarios easier. The BBC may decide to tie logins to the license fee if rates of digitally-assisted fee evasion become untenable. The license fee may be abolished altogether by a future Conservative government, necessitating a shift to a subscription model. The BBC might also decide to open up iPlayer and Sounds to an international audience on a subscription basis.
If you object to mandatory logins, I'd suggest writing to your MP to ask them to help safeguard the BBC's funding.
The BBC is under threat because they refuse to innovate. They're not yet doing full scale 4k streaming, programs disappear after X number of days, and to be quite honest, they don't offer the value for money Netflix does.
And BBC's own shows, like Planet Earth 2 are already on Netflix, so why would you even still need a license fee at that point?
It made sense 20 years ago when there were only 5 or so channels, now there is so much content available so quickly (even if it's not "legal") that people are realizing it's a waste of money.
The BBC certainly doesn’t refuse to innovate. It has a massive history of technical innovation – not least broadcasting TV over IP multicast in 1999 and launching the iPlayer in 2005. There’s no point in them offering full scale 4k streaming given their catalogue, and the 4 week programme availability is a regulatory restriction due to competition concerns – this is demonstrated by the fact that they’re showing series back-to-back in the early hours to allow box-sets of older shows to be on iPlayer.
The BBC license fee is about £12.90/month, which to provide all the BBC National and Local Radio in addition to the multiple TV channels and their online offering is fantastic value.
Their shows will be disappearing from Netflix as rights expire in order to bring the content back to BritBox which will launch in the UK soon.
> Over-75s are entitled to a free TV license; this was historically funded by government subsidy
It was introduced in 2000 and fundamentally it was about buying older people's votes.
Ultimately the BBC are part of source of their own demise - the move to digital TV allowed them to innovate and move from a licensed based to a subscription based approach but they refused to take that option preferring the soft funding of the license fee and creating ever more channels.
They've got themselves in a right pickle - they justify the license fee on the basis of 'public interest broadcasting' but then spend it on stuff like Eastenders to compete with ITV (because if they're not popular the license fee becomes hard to justify)
Then of course they are largely responsible for the rise of Farage who they've put on Question Time 'more than any other politician'
You complain about Google limiting choice yet your action of taking podcasts from their service removes my capability of listening my device or service of choice. The BBC obsession with the Sounds app is becoming tiresome, and worrying, given how they are now trying to dictate how you access public broadcasting.
53 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] threadI too have been wondering how long podcasts will remain using RSS before being utterly demolished by paid for platforms.
Can you imagine if we had TV content shared over RSS? Actually pirates have distributed content through RSS for a long time and it was a much better UX than anything offered by the big players.
Good on the BBC for thinking ahead and taking difficult steps to protect consumers.
I'm going to continue supporting independent, freely-available RSS podcasts through Patreon/direct donation, and you should too. Nothing (short of ISP-level censorship) can make those hundreds of thousands of hours of decentralized, self-hosted content go away.
Perhaps if viewed through a technical/hacker lens. But platforms like Netflix, Spotify, and iPlayer have been successful at attracting (paying!) users precisely because their UX is so much better.
Better than traditional TV boxes, and also better than the pirate world.
Why don’t they do what users actually want?
The problem is the policies.
Lower down they've said "we need more people signed in"
Then lower down that they've decreed "if we force people to sign in, we'll increase the numbers signing in, even if we reduce the total users using the system"
But I haven’t seen anything being removed from iPlayer Radio yet.
BTW - you can find non-music stuff in Categories below the fold on the Sounds app - so there’s Drama, for example.
No more granular categorisation into Crime, Historical etc - which is a shame
I am genuinely shocked as to why they're pushing it so hard, especially given that the current iplayer radio app is fantastic.
But one thing iPlayer Radio has never been very good at is content discovery. You really have to know what you’re looking for, where as Netflix or Spotify are pretty good at the “you like these genres, so you’ll love this one!” game.
I believe this personalisation aspect is what BBC are trying to solve with Sounds.
The only thing i really need of a podcast is an rss feed. Why make it complicated .
As a proud listener, viewer and supporter of the BBC, this is one part that seems really unfortunate. Why should I need an account to listen to BBC content? All the pages on the BBC website that pretend to answer this question are evasive and dodge the question. What do you have to hide?
Please re-consider. Allow your content to be made available via open standards, like some of your podcasts. Let us choose how to consume the content that we fund.
Please let me use whatever device and app I want. I don't use a Google account on my android phone because I value my privacy. That means I can't install the Sounds app. Please let me listen to the BBC without having to have a Google or Apple account.
Please let us listen to radio without being tracked. Trust is already eroded given the evasive wording on your help pages.
Please think of those people in the UK who don't have a post-code (like visitors) or email address (like the elderly).
And please come clean about why you need personal details to listen to the radio.
It doesn't apply to audio of course, but watching BBC video content now requires you to be a licence payer doesn't it? So they need to know who you are. I guess they just extended the system to all content for simplicity.
We don't have radio licenses any more. You don't need a TV license to listen to radio.
> I guess they just extended the system to all content for simplicity.
The 'iPlayer' app (web and native) is entirely different to the 'iPlayer Radio' and 'Sounds' apps. It's not simple to add auth to apps totally unrelated to TV.
If they said "our technology platform is cheaper if we track every user's activity and prevent anyone from accessing it without authentication" then at least that would be honest. I think it would raise some very legitimate questions, though.
FWIW I don't think this is the case. You can access BBC Sounds fine from other parts of the world, just with ads inserted. If they can geolocate non-UK listeners to substitute auth for ads, they can geolocate UK listeners without auth or ads.
I don't mind paying the TV license fee as the content is excellent, but I browse the website and download what I want to watch with youdube-dl, because I categorically reject their creepy tracking, which they refuse to properly explain. If youtube-dl stops working, I'll keep paying the licence to support the programming, but will look for torrents of the shows to download instead.
The database for the BBC website logins and the database for people who have a license fee aren't connected, and couldn't be under the Data Protection Act.
The BBC login doesn't check if the information is valid, or if you have a license, it's literally just for user tracking for data.
Watching tv without a licence is a crime and DPA includes exceptions for the detection or prevention of crime.
Which bit of DPA do you think prevents them linking these databases?
The BBC can absolutely take an individual login to iPlayer that they think is suspicious, and have TV licensing determine if that address has a license.
But it is objectively true that you can type in any old nonsense into a BBC account registration and it does not validate it against the License Fee database - that's because moving to a general system of checking is not what that database would be collected for, and would probably not be found to be a proportionate or non-general monitoring and therefore cannot use that exemption.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/77bdafd0-20b...
Jesus christ
I am very grateful that we have Radio 3, 4 and various podcasts. The news is generally balanced and generally of high quality. I think that's reasonable contextualization for the comment.
BBC News is a government mouthpiece, I would rather the UK government didn't have a means to distribute their propaganda directly to my TV or phone or computer under the guise of a "friendly national broadcaster".
The BBC doesn't do themselves any favours in winning back non-payees with these tactics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If its truly about improving consumer experience its optional. I am not required to login to Chrome or Firefox to use them even though some people find bookmark/history syncing to be useful features.
To draw a very apposite analogy, YouTube on Android requires sign-in for minor functionality. There's no 'back' button and you can't bookmark videos for later. The UX is deliberately crippled unless you sign in: clicked video by mistake? Good luck getting back to the previous one.
This is a choice they made. It's not beyond the whit of an Android app to store bookmarks locally and sync them when you sign-in. Or to maintain a history for a back button.
The ostensible reason is "so you can have a uniform experience across all devices". The real reason is "so we can use your data to shift ads". We all know this, and it's part of the Google value proposition. It's free because they exploit your data.
The BBC is something different altogether. It's partly non-profit, has no shareholders, funded in a unique way, and, without wishing to seem mawkish, something special. Emulating commercial SV companies leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth. That combined with the privileged place it holds in public life, is not a nice combination.
Maybe Netflix has some nice features. Maybe the BBC can adopt them. But if they really are for _my_ benefit, let me opt in, don't make it compulsory.
I’ve sadly seen many many features like this (just watch the industry - who hasn’t?) that are sold under one seemingly positive guise only to be used for another negative one later.
Regardless of public statements on the matter today, I’m really not sure the BBC will resist the temptation longer term to use iPlayer logins as a licence fee enforcement tool among other things, it’s too easy to spin positively as a business decision.
Much of my own unease in all of this is due to the BBC’s odd nature as a kind of hybrid public/private entity. Perhaps the time has come to just let the BBC be a private company and compete directly with Netflix et al, at which point I would care much less about how access is provided. If it is to be a public broadcaster though, I think one of its primary duties should be to be as open as is practical.
The BBC's funding is increasingly under threat and the license fee is being used to fund a wide range of non-core and non-BBC services; mandatory logins are a hedge against several risks.
Over-75s are entitled to a free TV license; this was historically funded by government subsidy, but that subsidy will be completely phased out by 2020-21. This will create a revenue shortfall of about £0.5bn, of a total budget of around £4bn.
On the other end of the age spectrum, an increasing proportion of young people are living in TV-less households, making it far easier for them to continue watching BBC programming while evading the license fee.
The BBC is increasingly reliant on international commercial partnerships (most notably the BritBox streaming service) in order to raise revenues, but this is potentially jeopardised by the increasing use of VPN services; GeoIP walls aren't very useful if a large proportion of internet users can choose their IP location with a couple of clicks.
Mandatory logins make a lot of possible future scenarios easier. The BBC may decide to tie logins to the license fee if rates of digitally-assisted fee evasion become untenable. The license fee may be abolished altogether by a future Conservative government, necessitating a shift to a subscription model. The BBC might also decide to open up iPlayer and Sounds to an international audience on a subscription basis.
If you object to mandatory logins, I'd suggest writing to your MP to ask them to help safeguard the BBC's funding.
And BBC's own shows, like Planet Earth 2 are already on Netflix, so why would you even still need a license fee at that point?
It made sense 20 years ago when there were only 5 or so channels, now there is so much content available so quickly (even if it's not "legal") that people are realizing it's a waste of money.
Which is true.
The BBC license fee is about £12.90/month, which to provide all the BBC National and Local Radio in addition to the multiple TV channels and their online offering is fantastic value.
Their shows will be disappearing from Netflix as rights expire in order to bring the content back to BritBox which will launch in the UK soon.
Edit - corrected fee
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/general/licence_fee
It was introduced in 2000 and fundamentally it was about buying older people's votes.
Ultimately the BBC are part of source of their own demise - the move to digital TV allowed them to innovate and move from a licensed based to a subscription based approach but they refused to take that option preferring the soft funding of the license fee and creating ever more channels.
They've got themselves in a right pickle - they justify the license fee on the basis of 'public interest broadcasting' but then spend it on stuff like Eastenders to compete with ITV (because if they're not popular the license fee becomes hard to justify)
Then of course they are largely responsible for the rise of Farage who they've put on Question Time 'more than any other politician'
We've got a TV license but hardly ever watch BBC
This isn't strictly true. You can sideload an APK even without a Google account.
Obviously the BBC making its content more accessible would still be a good thing, and most people aren't going to go sideloading their Sounds app.