Restriction of BBC Radio HLS/DASH to authorised third parties

[tommyrot]

Thank you, Simon. I look forward to this update.

Did the BBC expand on their reasons for refusing your request for authorised streams? I presume that you made a reasonable offer to fulfil their (unquenchable) thirst for listening data. For a while, I thought the BBC wanted to authenticate individual listeners via BBC account data, but that cannot be the case because NAIM have migrated to the BBC's authorised streams and my MuSo streams just work without me providing any login info. So, it's really about validating the streaming entities.

As for piggy-backing authorised streams from a 3rd party, I'm uneasy about this because I suspect the BBC will just clamp down on it. Which would put us all back to square one. Sorry to sound bleak – it's more a comment on the Tzarist executives at the BBC Sounds unit than anything else.

**Update**: A notice on the NAIM forum (in July) on this topic provides the following info:

"The streams require a rolling token to get access, that require server side logic to implement this dynamic token generation."

"No data is shared. The token/login is there to ensure BBC streams are represented on the 3rd party platforms to the BBC distribution rights docs. That means correct logos and names, prominent position, not injecting adverts or non BBC material etc.

In practice it will give a better end user experience, as will minimise third parties making a mess of things."

"The HLS feeds will require a distribution licence agreement signed between either the radio database company (vtuner, airable, etc) or the equipment manufacturer. A dynamically generated secure token will then be needed to access the streams."

Notwithstanding NAIM's technical teams, the technicalities of this sound like something Simon could implement in his sleep, so I don't understand why it wasn't possible to agree terms with the BBC.