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Banner: ABC
I don't know whether it's the reason, but a super obvious one would be to be able to measure how many people consume different shows etc.
If you read their articles or listen to their shows on third-party feeds, they have no way of knowing. Before you claim this is a good thing, some show you love might get cut because they don't know it's actually popular.
I just use their apps, so I'm not affected. I can see how people who prefer aggregate apps would dislike this, however.
However was this solved before the ability to surveil everyone all the time? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
You know, we don't actually know what roads are efficient. Let's gps tag every car. Actually we don't know at what hours of the day people need water, we could optimise this if we put a camera in everyone's kitchen sink.
I swear neolibs are more in favour of restrictive surveillance than the most ardent ML.
edit: god fucking dammit everything about your comment pisses me off. You don't "consume" a radio program, nothing is destroyed by you listenining to it. You listen, there's a fucking non business-idoit product-brain word for participating in radio programming as as an audience and it's called listening. L-I-S-T-E-N-I-N-G can you spell it you weirdo?
Do you think it's bad for a generator of content to determine if said content is being viewed / listened (or consume)?
However was this solved before the ability to surveil everyone all the time? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Such a stupid false dichotomy. Can you seriously not think of any solutions other than indiscriminate, nonconsentual surveillance?
Also what the fuck is content. Why do you all speak like pod people
Gee whiz you seem empassioned by this. Ok, so as a taxpayer and a funder of a public service, I'd like elements of the service to be held accountable by key performance indicators. Obviously a fairly clear indicator would usually be reach/ viewership. Do you have any alternatives ? I'm not sure what pod people are?
Here are some:
Surveys, very old technology, worked for 100 years. Know how statistics work? You can survey x from X and generalise any x' from X within known confidence intervals.
Voluntary tracking: Ask users if they would be ok making an account. Consent, it's good in more situations than the bedroom
Track IPs. You own the server that is issuing the streams, IPs can be broadly associated with areas. Pretty good stats. Some people forward streams or use VPNs? statistical noise who cares.
btw it would have been faster to look up pod people than write about your ignorance.
Theres a place for trying ro understand consumer lukes and dislikes. But a national broadcaster has a wider duty to deliver the information the nation needs to here without fear or bias. Note, I am not saying the ABC today meets that duty.
Listening too much to the preferences of the listeners introduces a bias and a circular logic to deliver more of the popular shows with those listeners because otherwise why have the data analysis if you don't act on it. Same can be said of trying to attract non-listeners. Sometimes less is more.
People don't often want to be challenged, but its often what they need to hear to temper their own beliefs of their correctness. Thats a key public service that is necessarily affected by reacting your audience/non-audience too well. Its like fact-checking, no one wants it, but it works.
ABC radio also often contains way more enriching stuff than news. Longform discussion with experts, interviews and dicussions with random citizens affected by something, curated musical showcases (a good blend of classics and modern stuff like videogame music) that aim to teach audiences about a genre and promote Australian performers.
It's legit some of the best stuff out there for entertainment that grows you and connects you to the broader political project that is Australia.
Fucking stupid to wall it up and make it harder to listen to than corporate slop.
Well that's shit. Anyone running a campaign against this?
ABC listen is the easiest way to continue enjoying all the ABC’s audio content in one place, on a wide range of devices. When you use ABC listen, you can discover more shows and podcasts you might enjoy, and we’re able to offer helpful features like personalisation and recommendations.
Translation: We prefer to force you into our walled garden where we can track your behaviour and market to you. Driven by corporate-world execs, I would guess?
ABC makes radio stations available via third party radio partners as follows:
- RadioApp - all ABC stations are available.
- TuneIn - you can find the ABC national stations, apart from ABC Sport. All local ABC stations have been removed.
- iHeartRadio - All ABC Radio stations have been removed from iHeartRadio.
The uneven application described here makes it even more confusing. Maybe they're trying to extract licensing fees from these platforms?
Oh they also killed RSS feeds for news.
https://help.abc.net.au/hc/en-us/articles/6147104938383-Why-are-RSS-feeds-no-longer-being-updated
They're actually still around (and updated), just hidden for some reason.
e.g. Here is their "top stories" feed.
Baffling
I can only assume it's a prelude to requiring an account like iview (guess who doesn't watch abc anymore) for Metrics and licensing fees.
I'd rather we just fund the broadcaster and make it easy to use hey? A modern browser is not a default piece of software to have running. They're some of the most bloated and ridiculous things that exist.
This country is fucking stupid, the government just repeatedly self owns by not understanding the purpose of providing easy and free access to state services. Having a national broadcaster to create a sense of community and shared purpose, and to lift up and inspire your citizenry along the safe lines you desire is like a really good thing if you're a centralising bureaucrat.
Neoliberal business brain will be the end of community.
I hope this doesn't affect podcasts. Podcasting is an open standard and the ABC Listen app is a closed system.
If I can't listen to their podcasts in my preferred podcatcher I'll be sad, but not enough to start using another app for it.