TV Player

Yep, nothing like the Freeview app in Australia which has direct streams of most of the channels on the app.

Yes - the BBC, ITV and C4 will want metrics on who is watching and what they are watching to drive personalisation.

As seen with the BBC's decision today to pull their radio stations from the TuneIn app from the end of August due to TuneIn not agreeing to share data metrics with the BBC.

And not at all to drive people to the BBC Sounds App, which I really don't know why it exists.

In an 'all IP' future - which is where broadcasting is going, personalisation and recommendations will be key, and gathering metrics personal to each user are vital. They are already a major aspect of Netflix's and YouTube's success (and why Netflix has user profiles within its app).

Additionally, once (or if) RAJAR and BARB become increasingly irrelevant, the BBC needs listener and viewer metrics to understand what viewers are watching and listening to and like or don't like.

Increasingly, any platform that can't supply the BBC with the metrics it feels it needs, will not be able to syndicate the BBC's content. The BBC has been quite audience-friendly with the TuneIn move. They will continue to supply TuneIn with BBC content on platforms that only support TuneIn asa route to accessing BBC services (like Sonos), but other devices (Amazon Echo, Google Assistant etc.) where BBC content is available via other routes that provide the BBC with audience metrics will no longer have TuneIn support for BBC services (as TuneIn don't provide the BBC with the data they want, in return for access to BBC services)

The BBC Sounds app, like the BBC iPlayer app, is a way of ensuring the BBC gets the metrics it wants, and is a way of developing a personalisation profile (like Facebook+Instagram, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube+Google do) that will increasingly be vital.

Urgh, is this going to stop me waking up to 6 Music on my Echo?

I think that function only works with TuneIn streams on the Echo.

It wouldn't surprise me if sports rights are involved in this retraction as well as audience metrics.

I believe I've got this right, Allowing some domestic streams in the wild globally undermines the Talksport worldwide syndication rights to some matches whose domestic broadcaster remains the BBC. This is a result of the new 2019-22 rights cycle awards sometime ago and has come to a head now.

I might have got this wrong but .....

The BBC have two sets of streams for the national stations, one is for the UK only which streams the full content, including sports commentaries. The other is for overseas which doesn't have sports commentaries or other copyrighted content meant for the UK only and is usually lower bitrate. The UK streams go up to 320kbps AAC+.

Local radio on the other hand blocks out sports commentaries due to rights being within the locality of the station only.

If it was a sports issue, the BBC could easily give the overseas streams only to TuneIn.

I doubt it.

The BBC generate both a UK-only 'full' stream (which is geoblocked), and an International 'rights restricted' stream which isn't geo-blocked, but which doesn't carry material that the BBC only have UK rights for (like sport commentary), for their radio live streams.

AIUI the International streams are traditionally available in more codecs and on more platforms than the UK-only streams.

This is very much about metrics. It's a similar reason to that behind the BBC pulling their podcasts from Google's podcast app.

That's definitely counter-intuitive to what an app should be. While it does still give traffic to the apps themselves it just makes having the "Freeview" app feel a bit more pointless.

Baby TV was also pulled from TVPlayer on the same date as well.