New BBC internet radio streams 2025
Editor’s note: TL;DR Latest streams can be found here.
For reasons best known to itself, the BBC decided to close many of its internet radio streams yesterday (2025-01-21). Fortunately there are alternatives. After a bit of scrambling and hacking, I’ve been able to cobble together an updated list of BBC national and local radio stations, complete with clickable URL’s – well, around 61 of them anyway. So here’s our latest internet radio streams 2025 edition…
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BBC radio streams as a VLC/SMPlayer compatible “*.m3u playlist
BBC radio streams as a simple plain text list
Known to be missing or unavailable for some reason
- BBC Radio 1 Relax, (defunct).
- BBC Radio Four LW, (normally identical to Radio 4 FM).
- BBC 5 Sports Extra (only available in the UK anyway).
Other comments and caveats
- The above information comes with no warranty express or implied.
- The above are public radio streams supplied by the BBC via its chosen content distribution networks. All GarfNet is doing is displaying the URLs for these streams. We have nothing whatsoever to do with, nor are we responsible for the actual streams themselves. Moreover it’s perfectly possible that the BBC could kill these streams, with or without warning at some point in the future. However, as of right now (2025-01-22 21:29 UTC) all the above URL’s seem to work as expected.
- I have also included links to our “Other Stations” M3U playlist.
- More information about using internet radio can be found on our internet radio page…
Credits
With many thanks to https://radio-browser.info and to readers Ed999, Joe and Dave for your input.
Once again, you have come to my rescue 🙂
https://bbcradiorelay.net was working for only two stations but I didn’t notice at first and thought my reverse proxy was to blame.
You’re welcome. 🙂
Any idea what the URL for the BBC Radio 3 Unwind stream is now please? I tried the obvious but without success.
Please try the lstn.lv Radio 3 stream listed on https://garfnet.org.uk/cms/tables/radio-frequencies/internet-radio-player/
You may need to play it from within the M3U playlist I provide lower down on that page. It does work. I’m listening to it right now.
CBeebies Radio (UK-only)
#DASH
https://a.files.bbci.co.uk/ms6/live/3441A116-B12E-4D2F-ACA8-C1984642FA4B/audio/simulcast/dash/uk/pc_hd_abr_v2/aks/cbeebies_radio.mpd
#HLS
http://as-hls-uk-live.akamaized.net/pool_33504832/live/uk/cbeebies_radio/cbeebies_radio.isml/cbeebies_radio-audio=320000.norewind.m3u8
http://as-hls-uk-live.akamaized.net/pool_33504832/live/uk/cbeebies_radio/cbeebies_radio.isml/cbeebies_radio-audio=320000.m3u8
Interesting. Seems the Dash stream works OK. Sadly it seems the Akamai HLS streams do not. They just return “Access Denied” error.
Thank you very much, that is most kind of you.
Glad to be of service. 🙂
Thank you for this list. All the 320 sites work from Europe now
Excellent! Thanks for letting me know.
Thank you! Much appreciated. I’d previously bookmarked your site for help with the previous BBC streaming apocalypse https://garfnet.org.uk/cms/2023/10/29/latest-bbc-hls-radio-streams/ and now in January 2025 you delivered once again. Thank you!
You’re welcome. Glad to know you found it useful. 🙂
I believe the BBC streams have gone again!
Which ones Dave? They all seem to work for me.
Sorry Garf, I was too quick to report. The BBC streams were not working this morning (Checked 5 live, Radio 4 and other random ones). I can confirm they ARE WORKING now.
Thanks for the update. 🙂
I can confirm BBC streams are now working. It must have been a temporary blip this morning
I have found two new BBC stream urls on https://www.radio-browser.info/. I had to slightly adjust the urls to work with my particular setup (using ssh in python to send MPD/MPC commands to a Raspberry Pi Zero):
BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra:
https://www.radio-browser.info/history/6e32bf0a-91c0-43f3-8de6-7fb77f204977
My adjusted stram URL:
https://lstn.lv/bbcradio.m3u8?station=bbc_radio_five_live_sports_extra“&bitrate=320000&uk=1”
BBC Radio 5 Live (with sports not blocked, 2025)
https://www.radio-browser.info/history/472a608a-3053-451d-b630-bda57338b8e4
My adjusted stream URL:
https://lstn.lv/bbcradio.m3u8?station=bbc_radio_five_live“&bitrate=128000&uk=1”
Thanks Dave. radio-browser.info is indeed an excellent site and the guy who runs it, Alex Segler is a very clever chap. I think he now lists around 50,000 radio streams. It’s one of our main sources of information, and we make a point of crediting his site at the bottom of our main Internet Radio page.
The stream you found is actually almost but not quite the same as the one we publish. The main part of the string is exactly the same:-
https://lstn.lv/bbcradio.m3u8?station=bbc_radio_five_live
The difference is is the string at the end of the URL. This determines its bit-rate and whether its available worldwide or just in the UK. You’ll notice that the stream we publish for BBC Radio 5 ends “&bitrate=320000” (with the quotes represented by the html escape number %22). Yours: “&bitrate=128000&uk=1” connects to a lower bit-rate version of the same stream, and is only available in the UK.
The &uk=1 part can be useful because some transmissions are not available worldwide due to copyright restrictions. Adding the &uk=1 at the end, forces the UK version of the stream, thus enabling you to listen to copyright restricted material that may not be available worldwide. Of course, this only works if you actually are in the UK! 🙂
Looks like the streams have gone offline again 🙁
Thank you for your comment. I have just tested a few random HLS and MPD streams and they all seem OK. Can you give me the URL of the stream that failed for you please? And what software/player you were using to play it?
Bit of a shock downunder in NZ seeing Radio 3 et al being taken from us, and realising a lot of taking down has been happening while the BBC’s “sometime in spring” timeframe is still fuzzy. Streams disappearing, Sounds app not in app stores outside UK etc.
Been trying to figure out what will still work outside UK if anything. Following the comments above I have been testing the new “Akamaized” URLs, and they work in foobar2000, but not in VLC. The now-defunct “bbci.co.uk” URLs worked for me in VLC previously.
VLC now appears to try to play them, but they never start and there are no errors. This is with and without the quotes as above. Any ideas on that?
I’m a little puzzled by this. I recently updated and tested the BBC streams and they all seem to work just fine. Granted I’m in the UK But they are the international streams. Can you tell me please, the exact URLs for the streams that are failing? Meantime links to all the most recently updated and tested URL’s can be found here…
https://garfnet.org.uk/cms/tables/radio-frequencies/internet-radio-player/
From there, you’ll find complete sets of both HLS and MPD streams for all the BBC national and local radio stations that are known to be working. Both sets have been tested in VLC on Debian. Please check them out and let me know if those work for you?
Hiya
Well this is embarrassing, VLC happily plays those streams today. The URLs are the ones listed in your two links at the top of this page (m3u and txt) eg https://lstn.lv/bbcradio.m3u8?station=bbc_london&bitrate=320000.
Foobar actually reports the final URL as http://as-hls-ww-live.akamaized.net/pool_98137350/live/ww/bbc_london/bbc_london.isml/bbc_london-audio=320000.norewind.m3u8, while VLC reports the lstn.lv URL.
What is curious is that all the streams in your list are 320kbps, and yet I can listen to them outside the UK. I thought those hi-res streams were UK only?
So for the moment we’re all good, though I’m not expecting that state to persist as the shutdown progresses!
Now I know what it was. VLC doesn’t like the latency of NordVPN and it struggles to connect, but it’s fine with no VPN. VPN doesn’t seem to bother foobar at all.
I’d been experimenting with VPN and direct connect to see what’s working and what doesn’t work.
As mentioned all of these URLs work to NZ anyway (w/o VPN). Odd.
Interesting. That’s worth knowing. Thanks for getting back to me.