The BBC has been throwing a lot of promotional welly behind its BBC Sounds app in recent months, touting its ability to serve live radio, music and podcasts. It should come as little surprise to anyone, then, that the broadcaster is retiring its existing iPlayer Radio app.
“We’ve been improving Sounds all the time, and the time has come to switch off iPlayer Radio so the BBC only has one audio app,” wrote the Beeb’s director of radio and education, James Purnell.
The shutdown will start on 16 September, and will take a couple of weeks. “iPlayer Radio has given us a great foundation for Sounds. But it had limited options for on-demand listening, and we needed a new digital home for all of our stations, programmes and music mixes to ensure we keep serving everyone,” wrote Purnell. He also said that BBC Sounds now has “nearly 1.9 million weekly signed in users” – representing growth from January this year, when Purnell revealed that BBC Sounds had been averaging “more than a million listeners a week”, although it had just posted a record high of 1.36 million listeners in the most recent week.
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