BBC internet radio streams broken again!
BBC Radio is about the only thing the moderm BBC has to offer that might justify its antiquated and much resented television licence fee. Or rather it was up until yesterday (2024-01-21), when sadly 3/4 of its AAC/HLS internet radio streams inexplicably fell silent. I’ve written to BBC Sounds to ascertain the problem and received an acknowledgement. But as yet, no explanation or solution.
I’m not the only person experiencing this. Several comments just from users on my blog. I provide (or used to provide) a set of working, oven-ready VLC and SMPlayer playlists of all BBC national and local stations for users of non proprietary players. It’s a very trivial contribution to the overall scheme of things but some people seemed to like it…
I also noted that radio-browser.info (an excellent sort of ‘wikipedia’ type resource for internet radio enthusiasts that beats the pants off anything that I’ve ever done) currently lists most BBC channels as “Broken”…
- https://www.radio-browser.info/search?page=0&order=clickcount&reverse=true&hidebroken=false&name=bbc
BBC site says nothing at all. This page is unchanged since 2023…
Hopefully Alex Segler (the guy who runs radio-browser.info and author of the excellent RadioDroid internet radio app for Android) will find new streams, if they are available. We might even find them before he does, if we’re lucky. 🙂 Nevertheless the BBC’s lack of information and its inexplicably unhelpful attitude towards users of open source players is deeply frustrating and completely contrary to its claims of making its internet radio available to everyone. 🙁
Update
Just received a reply supposedly from the BBC, that in fact came from a crappy UK government subcontractor called Capita (capitabbcas.co.uk). Basically it told me to clear my cookies and refresh my browser. Which is utter bollocks of course, For those not familiar with it, Crapita is a disgraceful company. It does all the BBC’s TV Licensing dirty work. Unsurprisingly it does not accept replies to technical “solutions”. So it seems Iv’e drawn a blank there.
Meantime there is an analysis of the problem over at radio-browser.info. This one apples to BBC Radio 5 Live, but all the faulty channels show the same fault, namely “IllegalStatusCode(410)”.