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I subscribe to Sonos Radio HD, and it would be great to not have the Sonos intro ads when starting iHeartRadio stations.

After it was announced that TuneIn would go away, I moved over to iHeartRadio for streaming local radio stations. That’s fine except launching a station always plays a Sonos ad (“Hands free is now worry free…”) plus the stations own stream intro/ad, so it usually takes a good 30s to get going.

Of course can’t control the stream’s intro, but shouldn’t being a radio subscriber be enough to skip me the Sonos plug? It’s just annoying to hear the same thing multiple times a day, and also inferior to the previous TuneIn experience.

Hi @binaurasaur, welcome to the Sonos Community!

You shouldn’t be getting Sonos Voice Control ads on iHeartRadio, just the stations own intro. Another user on the community has noticed the same issue when they use iHeartRadio and it was suggest that they call in as we community moderators don’t have access to this service, this thread being:

We’ve raised this to our team to investigate as it may be the start of something, but I’d still recommend reaching out to our support team to log your case and to troubleshoot any solutions.

I hope this helps!

Thanks for the info, Jamie. I did call in to Sonos support and the answer there was that iHeartRadio is a separate platform (outside of Radio HD, which I get, even though the channels are accessed via the Sonos Radio HD service), so I should expect to hear Sonos ads prior to iHeartRadio streams. Which isn’t  a fully satisfying answer, given that it seems it is Sonos playing ads before the stream starts (which has its own intro/ad), and they are often about Sonos voice control. I did mention what you’d said above.

If this is expected behavior, I have been looking for a place to submit feature requests or feedback on the Radio HD  product, if there’s a recommended way to do that.

Small thing I know, but just looking to help improve!

 

Hi @binaurasaur,

I’ve checked with our team about this and it is being looked into but hasn’t been listed as a bug/issue yet. Our team was gathering information from the community and support to see who and how many this issue is effecting.

if I hear anything back about this then I’ll be sure to update this thread. However, as a test, if you ad Sonos Voice Control do you still get the ad for it when playing an iHeartRadio station? You can remove the voice service after testing, but it would be interesting to know.

For feature requests and feedback, you can always create a new thread on the community that we can mark as feedback and provide to the relevant teams. 

I hope this information helps!

 

Hello, I’m happy to report that on attempting to open Sonos Radio HD and play an iHeartRadio station today, I was prompted to re-authorize my account. I did, and upon proceeding, no more Sonos ads before the stream starts. I’ve tested a few stations and looks consistently resolved.

I’m not sure if that was just good timing, or someone flagged to re-authorize my account, or if totally unrelated, but looking/sounding good now.

Unfortunately have to report back, above did not permanently solve the issue. When ada recurred the next day, tried the same reauthorize with no luck. Finally switched back to same streams through TuneIn (in the Radio HD service); no Sonos ads there.

I do appreciate the community support!

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