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Lead Maestro
September 13, 2020

Tune-In blocking foreign radio stations in the UK Master thread

  • September 13, 2020
  • 101 replies
  • 19935 views

As Sonos don’t seem to want to, lets try and consolidate the TuneIn UK problem into one master thread.

What we know: starting last Thursday, TuneIn in the UK started blocking all foreign radio stations. They did this because of a lawsuit they lost in November 2019.

Some have also claimed that Sonos Radio is also affected.

The known work-arounds are:

  • Add the direct streaming url of the station to the Sonos system (only available to PC and Mac users detailed here
  • Try a different radio station aggregator (eg radio.com)

 

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101 replies

Lyricist I
September 19, 2020

As Sonos don’t seem to want to, lets try and consolidate the TuneIn UK problem into one master thread.

What we know: starting last Thursday, TuneIn in the UK started blocking all foreign radio stations. They did this because of a lawsuit they lost in November 2019.

Some have also claimed that Sonos Radio is also affected.

The known work-arounds are:

  • Add the direct streaming url of the station to the Sonos system (only available to PC and Mac users detailed here
  • Try a different radio station aggregator (eg radio.com)

 

Thanks so much for this. It was a massive frustration that suddenly our favourite station 1Live was blocked. Tunein were useless and clearly don’t care about their European and British customers. Sonos should know better. Thanks again. URL solution worked a treat and everyone happy!

Lyricist I
September 22, 2020

I use Sonos as my alarm clock and set it up so that Sonos Radio plays the UK TalkRadio station for an hour. About once every two weeks it plays a different station, a local one, not a national one.

Has anyone had this happen to them or have a fix?

Lyricist II
September 24, 2020

Hi. Not a sonos user but tripped over this thread looking for the same topic. The tunein situation is affecting denon, roberts radio etc - some are moving to different aggregator. However, for those that don’t know, if you can’t find the URL for a radio station stream, go to their webpage, play live and then from google chrome press F12 to open the page elements and under the network tab you will usually find an element with the stream URL which you can right click and open in a new tab to check it is actually the stream.

It may be easy to identify by a large “activity bar”, it may be called “stream” you may have to search for it, but it will be there somewhere.

Lyricist III
September 24, 2020

Mr Rusty. How i wish this had worked for my favourite station on Live 365.

The whole thing is a nightmare for Sonos users.

Lyricist II
September 25, 2020

Yes agree,not 100%, but does work for a lot of stations. If the stream URL is buried in a script somewhere though it doesn’t work. Why stations that want listeners don’t actively publish their streaming URLs on their websites is a mystery to me.

Airgetlam
September 25, 2020

Because if they did, they’d be sued for enabling illegal play? 
 

Bruce
Lyricist II
September 25, 2020

No that answer doesn’t make sense because some stations do post stream links

https://radioparadise.com/listen/stream-links

 

Airgetlam
September 25, 2020

Depends on each station’s lawyers, and risk assessment. It certainly varies widely from station to station, even within a specific geographic area. 

Bruce
Airgetlam
September 25, 2020

As well as the technology they have available for geo blocking, which likely also varies widely.

Bruce
September 25, 2020

No that answer doesn’t make sense because some stations do post stream links

https://radioparadise.com/listen/stream-links

 

I am not sure your answer makes sense. Firstly because it assumes everyone is now complying. 

Also because a station publishing its own links is rather different from a service that provides links to tens of thousands of stations with which it has no association, is it not?