BBC iPlayer Radio is dead

I am sorry to announce that the BBC iPlayer Radio program no longer works and will not work again ever.

It was probably the most popular WebbIE program: you could run it and get a plain-text list of programmes from the last seven days, and press return, and it would play it, and you could press keys to jump around the program. Super-accessible to screenreader users – a nice, simple, keyboard-based native Windows application.

The program showing how simple it was: one list for stations, one for all the programmes available with dates, a few big clear buttons or you can just use keys.

Sadly, commercial concerns have shut it off permanently. Licensing, rights, money, regional limitations – all conspire against the free and open BBC of twenty years ago. As the official BBC FAQ states:

We also must ensure that third parties are able to meet BBC requirements including prominence, which helps listeners to find content we’ve made for them, and sharing of data, which helps us understand what people are listening to, which in turn helps us improve our content and services. At the same time, it’s important we make sure that third parties do not use our streams without permission in non-compliant ways, like serving advertisements around our on demand content, for example.

So you have to use the BBC Sounds website where you can be denied access if you come from outside the UK and your usage can be tracked and, most importantly, you have to use the complicated web interface instead of just cursoring around. Sorry!

A bit of history. I first did a BBC radio program back in about 2004, when streaming media was just getting started. Back then it was all RealPlayer, running in Internet Explorer, which was easy enough to control and put an accessible user interface on. After a year or two I started getting help from the BBC: an engineer or manager would appear, announce some new paperwork or title or policy, give me some new URLs, and then go away again for a couple of years. Thanks to all those BBC employees who helped blind people and screenreader users find their way to all the great BBC radio programmes over their years, and thanks for all the kind words!

“The BBC site is accessible enough but it is a bit of a faff to use.”

“You get my vote, BBC is a  pain, demanding far too much technical and manual dexterity.”

“Your program is unbeatable when accessing particular segments of programmes accurately and quickly.  As far as I know, this can’t be done using Sounds.”

“Have used your software  for years, thanks a lot… I am visually impaired and use NVDA for my access.”

“It is a joy to use the simple interface.”

“I would like to thank you for such good programs.”

“Thanks so much, it’s my top Xmas present.”

1 thought on “BBC iPlayer Radio is dead”

  1. Hmm, I wonder if we could use the backend of Get_Iplayer. I’ll dig around, and see what the API is like.

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