If you create a radio station with a direct link to the BBC stream i think it fixes it for UK listeners as it bypasses Tunein. So far no rights issue notices. So far, I can’t be held responsible as it’s not my stream...

for radio 4 i use: http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_fourfm.m3u8

for radio 6 music i use:  http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_6music.m3u8

As far as i can tell these are the same quality, you can also stream these on VLC media player while out and about. Why? well if you use VLC you can set a much larger buffer than the BBC Sounds app and therefore get a more stable stream in the event of variable phone signal like in the car or on a train.

It’s tempting to blame the BBC for the rights issue. If they simply don’t have broadcast rights then they can’t let the data stream. If they only have rights in UK and the stream goes to multiple countries then they have to block it or breach the agreements they have for using the media. It’s more a factor of the complexity of how media rights are set up and sold. On TV/radio broadcast locally it’d just not come up. The nature of streaming reveals the prevously hidden issue.

For those who live in the UK using Radioplayer as opposed to Tunein for your source for BBC may well solve problems of this nature. For example we had a problem this week with the rights message whilst we were listening via Tunein (an old an alarm setting had initiated the stream) but we we started another speaker going using Radioplayer there was no issue.

Radio player is licensed for use in a few other countries so the problem maybe resolved for those countries although since this is about rights management maybe not