BBC Sounds is a streaming media and audio download service from the BBC that includes live radio broadcasts, audio on demand, and podcasts. The service is available on a wide range of devices, including mobile phones and tablets, personal computers, cars, and smart televisions. Media delivered to UK-based listeners does not feature commercial advertising. The BBC Sounds website replaced the iPlayer Radio service in October 2018. An initial beta version of the BBC Sounds app was launched in June 2018, with both the new app and the iPlayer Radio app supported until September 2019, when the iPlayer Radio app was finally decommissioned in the UK. At present the Sounds apps are only available to users in the UK, whilst iPlayer Radio remains available to international users. An app for Connected TVs was released in March 2020. BBC Sounds differs from iPlayer Radio by acting as a place for original podcast material created by the BBC specifically for the app, as opposed to catch-up listening of its linear radio services. One example of this is the Beyond Today podcast, a daily online-only podcast produced by the Today team, exploring an issue in-depth with a younger audience in mind. The BBC has also announced plans to make podcasts from third party producers available within the BBC Sounds service. The new service has caused controversy amongst some former users of the iPlayer Radio app, who claim that the functionality does not have the same features as before, and that the new app is not supported for older versions of smartphones. Some broadsheet newspapers have claimed that these changes disproportionately affect older listeners, particularly those who listen to speech and comedy content on Radio 4
Development
BBC Sounds on the web was built from the ground up in the Node.js, React, Redux, and Express.js programming languages. The mobile applications were written in Swift for iOS, and in Kotlin for Android. Again these were written from the ground up. The apps were released on 26 June 2018, before the website had any Sounds branding, in order to gain early feedback. App features include the ability to look up station schedules, download and share media, rewind live radio, and listen in-car via either Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. Both the website and the apps are served with data from a single set of APIs called Radio and Music Services, or RMS, microservices built in the Scala programming language. This single source of data replaces a large number of different services that powered earlier incarnations of the radio products.
