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I’ve had a Sonos Beam 2 all of 3 days and am wondering if I’ve made a mistake. I would have expected a pretty slick experience yet it seems the simple task of getting BBC radio to work is an utter PITA.

After faffing on correcting my country etc to get it to let me setup the service I thought all was good. I asked Sonos to play BBC Radio 2 and it worked, same with Radio 4. This worked fine for a couple of days. Now suddenly though I’ve changed nothing I’m now just met with silence.

I can manually get the station to play via the Sonos App, however if I use Sonos Voice it fails, having looked in the app I can see its selected the requested station but then says ‘unknown content’ and is trying to play it through TuneIn. I’ve no idea why it’s suddenly started doing this when it was working perfectly?

I found another thread explaining a convoluted way to get it to work with Alexa, but I don’t want to use that and frankly if it can't process a basic voice command like this I’ll be sending it back. I’m hoping someone can help with a simple fix before I pack it up ☹️

 

Hi ​@Pkryder, welcome to the Sonos Community!

I’m sorry to hear that you’re having issues getting BBC Radio to play. 

If you’re in the UK, BBC Radio stations will be regionally blocked on radio aggregates such as TuneIn, which in turn would block it on Sonos Radio. BBC have a statement about this on their website:

Changes to BBC Radio on TuneIn

I tested this myself by heading to TuneIn’s website, where it listed BBC Radio 2 and 4 as region restricted. I also asked a colleague to test this for me with Sonos Voice Control and, while it does launch the station and shows it in the Sonos app, it doesn’t play anything due to the region restriction.

If you want to listen to BBC Radio while in the UK, you’ll need to add BBC Sounds to your Sonos system. While Sonos Voice doesn’t support BBC Sounds commands, Amazon Alexa does by adding Alexa to your Sonos device then enabling the BBC Sounds skill in the Alexa app. If your region wasn’t set to the UK on your Sonos profile, that may be why you were able to play BBC Radio 2 and 4 via TuneIn.

I hope this information helps.

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