The BBC iPlayer now uses Flash-based streams for live radio as well as on-demand radio on all its UK national radio stations. For live radio, the BBC iPlayer requires Flash Player v9.0.115 or above - which has been freely available since December 2007.
In the UK, the opportunity has been taken to greatly increase the audio quality: doubling the bitrates for most live streams, and using a significantly more efficient audio codec which increases the audio quality yet further. The results are excellent, says the BBC’s Executive Producer A/V Products, James Cridland in the BBC’s Internet blog.
For overseas listeners, the BBC is using 48kbps HE-AAC v2 format stereo streams (known by some as aacPlus) for all stations, excepting BBC Radio 5 Live which is a 32kbps HE-AAC v1 mono stream.
on Jun 21st, 2009 at 17:33
On this page http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/finding_programmes/real_wma_streams the BBC reveals all the URLs of the WMA streams. Also BBC Radio4 now has one. So even with an internet radio that is not capable to receive Real Audio streams you can receive this station now. Thanks a lot beeb!
on Jun 22nd, 2009 at 19:36
Pleasure, hotbirdwatcher - we rolled out the FM stations (R1, R2, R3 and R4) in Windows Media as part of this release.
(And the BBC iPlayer is the only place to find BBC Radio 4 LW in… stereo, oddly. No, really.)
on Jun 23rd, 2009 at 11:15
All BBC Local Radio stations will be going flash with a Windows Media version by August as well - making all BBC Radio available as flash and windows media and saying goodbye to Real.
James - any idea why we can’t deep link radio in the same way we can for TV on the iPlayer? Is it a music rights thing?