International Radio from UK

Hi @POG2023 

Thanks for your post! And, apologies for the delay.

Any radio stations that you can still find in the Sonos app should be playable, but, if you cannot find the station (excepting entries within Favourites or Recently Played) then geo-restrictions have likely rendered it unavailable to you. Music companies occasionally crack-down on stations that are not licensed to play in certain countries.

If the station still appears when browsing or searching, it should play. If you are able to browse or search any stations that then refuse to play, I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team - there is a procedure for us to follow to report stations, but an existing support case is needed to follow it, so I cannot personally assist you.

In the meantime, it is possible that you will have more success when playing the same stations via myTuner or Radioplayer. Neither service needs a log-in, so both are very quick and easy to add.

I hope this helps.

Radio player and MyTuner also prohibit U.K. users from accessing international streams along with Tunein who lost in court to Sony and Warner.

it is possible to add stations manually as Tunein favourites but there’s no viable way on SONOS to just browse for international radio stations using an aggregator.

The rest of the world does not suffer these anti public restrictions.just us in the U.K. 

Neither do those of us in the uk with products using different radio providers. My Yamaha gear, which uses airable, has no problems at all playing international streams that Sonos quite happily returns in searches but refuses to play. My previous Pioneer Avr had no issues playing them with vTuner.

The number of streams the Sonos app quite happily finds but refuses to play is far too many to even consider raising support tickets for and is Sonos’s problem to deal with as part of providing a quality service to a global market. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of owners to report streams the Sonos app incorrectly returns as being available it should be automatically filtered based on relevant geo-restrictions for the devices location.

Unfortunately the content providers aggressively pursue their artificial geo-restricted money making machines and don’t target the uk specifically. The BBC and Sky play the same games with the rest of the world.

I never had a single problem playing my preferred Italian radio from the UK on Sonos from MyTuner, before the bloody update!

Now I can search for the station, it is present, but as soon as I press Play it returns "Something went wrong".

Useless!!!

The timing is coincidental rather than a result of the new app.

My speakers lost access not long after the app update and were still using the 16.1 app and firmware. I can’t remember the date, but I did post at the time. The German, Danish and Romanian stations I stream all still appear in search results but none of them play using Sonos.

The only recommended solution was to add the stream URLs as a custom station to the new TuneIn integration. As that requires signing up for an account on another service I have no use for it just became another friction point and added to the growing list of reasons I chose to remove Sonos as my whole home audio system. I was already intending to remove Sonos but the May fiasco and ceo/ama responses were the push needed to remove them sooner than planned. I still have a few of my Ikea Sonos devices which weren’t worth the effort of selling for personal technical curiosity about the state of updates. 

As I understand it, Sonos provides an API to enable integration. Sonos supports the API, whilst the individual stations create an integration and support that. If the station doesn’t know there’s a problem - or that it’s affecting frustrated would-be listeners - why would they do anything? When a listener says “I can’t get the station” they can decide how much resource to put to fixing the issue. 

Indeed, Sonos provide a standard api and specification for 3rd parties to provide service integrations.

Within that they also detail the requirements for success and error status code and messages the provider needs to use when the Sonos servers, user applications and user devices communicate with the provider.

So when an application or device requests a station to stream it will receive a stream and a success status or it will receive and error status and message.

To run the whole platform Sonos collect functional data from the apps and devices which breaks down to a per service, per device level and is even as detailed as how long something played for on particular device, not just what was played or whether it was in a speaker group.

That functional data is a mix of data only Sonos use and also data Sonos forward to the 3rd party services. It will have a variety of uses, one of which should be to provide monitoring and alerting from a user perspective.

Sonos use the number of 3rd party integrations as a selling point for their products. They need to monitor the performance and usage of those integrations to ensure the 3rd parties aren’t in breach of their integration agreements with Sonos as well as whether they are providing a reliable service to Sonos users. To get an integration approved there is a lengthy multi month process involving manual and automated testing, which at the end Sonos will decide if the integration and service provided operates within spec and the term of the agreements or whether it is rejected and needs more work.

From a buyers perspective poor quality integrations reflect badly on Sonos, not the 3rd party.

For 3rd party integrations, such as TuneIn, myTuner, the Sonos platform communicates with their servers and they decide if a particular station is geo-restricted on their service. TuneIn, myTuner are station aggregators, it is not the station itself who has the integration with Sonos

With myTuner for example, the Sonos App and Speaker make requests to sonos.mytuner.mobi to get the stream URL. For mytuner search results my app and speakers never get as far as receiving the actual stream URL for the stations. The app and speaker will have the status code response and message which should form part of the functional data Sonos collect.

For an individual temporary outage of the actual station stream, then the error could easily be lost in the background level of errors.

For significant changes like a 3rd party integrated provider geo-restricts content, so all devices in a country no longer have access, the request data returned to the app and speakers will contain an error code with reason and should stand out above the base level noise in the metrics as an anomaly and increase in errors that triggers an alert for that service provider in that country.

When part of the service a company offers is acting as the gatekeeper for 3rd parties, only allowing approved integrations to make your product more attractive vs the competition they have a responsibility to your customers to ensure those integrations are operating as expected. They have the data available within their platform, so hand waving as not our responsibility 3rd party, users must tell us, isn’t good enough.

Yes, it requires more effort and thought around the data needed for monitoring, yes it requires appropriate monitoring, no you won’t catch all errors, but those 3rd party integrations reflect on the company reputation so you should want to make sure they are of high quality, reliable and working.

Give me one reason why I should not ditch my 7 Sonos Speakers.

I have an Internet radio from Goodmans (not Sonos quality but does the job) and recently purchased a Bose that allows me to stream any international radio station whilst based in the UK. I don't buy the geolocation restrictions as other companies support international radio station playing. 

I think I had enough with this malarkey and Sonos no longer offers me a competitive advantage. Shame that I trusted their platform and spent thousands...but then again, I don't have anything that serves my needs.

Thanks to a lawsuit in the UK, streaming foreign radio stations is blocked by many aggregators. Best workaround is to get a direct stream to the station, then battle with the new app to add that url to your Sonos system.

Different companies operate differently with how they provide radio streams, so not all are affected by the Tune-in vs Sony/Warner ruling.

Device manufacturers can choose who they use or how to provide radio backends when embedding the provider into their devices, so have different offerings. It doesn’t mean they are problem free, vTuner changed a few years ago and that provided it’s own issues for many brands who had integrated them.

There is a surprisingly mostly legal jargon free transcript of the 2021 TuneIn appeal here https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Warner-v-TuneIn-judgment.pdf

It went in TuneIn’s favour for providing UK radio streams

It went in Sony/Warners for international streams. One issue was while TuneIn tried to argue they were little more than a search engine for radio stations, they didn’t send users to the stations site and kept them on a tunein branded app and website, used UK targeted advertising in pre-roll before the stream and on the website to free tier users so were more than just a search engine/aggregator and were profiting without the legal rights to provide the stream, so were more than just an aggregator or search engine.

Interestingly Brexit had no impact because it was viewed under part of a 1988 Act and international copyright treaties from long before brexit, so the UK retained previous EU court judgements prior to Brexit.

International copyright has always been a minefield to deal with, with the rights holders and lawyers the only winners.