PBS $8/month?

On long drives these days, the best deal is to pay $12 a month for youtube, which eliminates all the ads on their videos and allows you to download videos in lowest resolution so you can listen to them on long drives with occasional glances at actual low rez video. As for Twitter, I've been in exile since start of November because of musk. I cashed in my single share of Twitter stock and then shut down my account and I've been grieving the loss of that community every day ever since!

 

Once again, I shall put a word in for BBC Sounds.

It's free (as an Android or Apple app - free to download and free to subscribe), and it has absolutely loads of really good stuff - music of every type, drama, comedy, documentaries, news and much more.

It's easy to navigate. It also has an Android Auto setting (I assume there's an Apple CarPlay one as well) which is easy to use when you're driving. You can download some (but not all, for copyright reasons) programmes to listen to when in areas with no signal, too.

A British commercial alternative, Global Player, is good for music, but there are a lot of adverts.

 

I find myself often working in the small hours of the night.
It's a telecomm thing....

Concur wholeheartedly with YouTube audio.
Although I loathe the YooTubes' political activism they are the best in the bunch (currently) for drive time listening.
....AND they strive to influence government instead of being influenced BY government....

I pay $12 a month....my ONLY paid subscription, in order to 'load and go' content so that I may listen.
Only a person who has no regard for their fellow drivers would be so base as to WATCH while driving, which is why paid subscribers are enabled to turn off the screen while listening to the audio....a feature not enabled to non-subscribers.

@ BBC....
They are an ultra-low cost, decent quality alternative but I would certainly not pay for it!
If you're within FM transmitter range of any US government funded radio station while driving at night you may listen to them for free.
Much of their content is worth it at that price, which places them a half-step above OUR government funded media which has to out-source their late night radio content.

MY mileage.
Yours might vary.

 

CBC radio had the same label applied by Twitter.

 

As I age I find I rarely if ever listen to the news. To be honest I don't much care.

Try to live in the here and now and have a positive influence and be positively influenced by what is happening locally.

I have no impact on what is going on in the distant world.

I will glance at Bing feed stories just to keep informed but generally am disgusted by what I read.

Sometimes it seems my time in the service and trips to Europe and Asia as well as working for Toyota and visiting Japan for extended work was a distant dream. I just have no interest in that part of my life.

 

AND by the Wikis.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation

"The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (French: Société Radio-Canada), branded as CBC/Radio-Canada, is the Canadian public broadcaster for both radio and television. It is a Crown corporation that receives public funding from the government."

For people playing along in the US version of the home game:

Crown corporations in Canada are government organizations with a mixture of commercial and public-policy objectives. They are directly and wholly owned by the Crown (i.e. the government of Canada or a province).


They are at least honest about who pays them...or there is an accuracy problem with the wikis.

 

maybe elon should hire tucker, i hear he's looking for work

 

I find NPR has some of the best, even handed, non-click-bait reporting anywhere.
I like YouTube, however, the algorithms tend to lead you into the more extremist side of things. When driving I far prefer my own songs/podcasts or NPR.

 

So love that my day started with news that Fox News fired Tucker... I hope whoever the greedy corrupt oligarch that hires him next fails at getting what they want very quickly and Tucker is unable to get another full time job lying to large numbers of people forevermore.

 

That's very clever. You've been able to save yourself money and stick it to The Man. As long as you're in a particular area and you can find the transmission frequency, you can listen to some of the BBC's weakest, dullest programming (BBC World has some decent content, but it doesn't come close to the 30 or 40 domestic channels available on BBC Sounds) without paying a cent.

The approach I took, as one of the Sheeple, was to get the app and sign up, and listen that way. This, in hindsight was stupid. I could have taken your approach and beaten The System and saved myself money by hunting for limited programming, at night, on FM stations.

Wait.....

....what??????

You're right. We've chosen to take different approaches here. You've managed to get it for free because you are clever.

BBC Sounds, on the other hand, is only available for a fee of £0.

They do show some flexibility, though. Here in Australia, I'm able to listen for A$0. On travels over the past year, I have listened for S$0, ฿0, AED0, CHF0, QAR0 and €0. It's great that they offer options in so many currencies.

But, like you say, YMMV. You may feel it is better to beat the system and work hard to get a limited product for the same no price as the easy-to-access full product.

 

I am fairly resistant to downloading closed-source, black-box apps onto my phone, so anything that was USD 0 but required me to do so would not quite count as free in my way of accounting.

A dozen years ago, NPR had an Android app that was open-source and available on f-droid, as one might think proper for a publicly-funded outfit. But then they seemed to abandon it for a black box.

 

Good point. You never know what the British might do to you.

 

They, or the hodge-podge of suppliers to whom they presumably outsource their app.

 

Last time I heard, it was done in-house. My friend's brother ran it for a while.

Still, up to you. Any outsourced supplier could be doing it purely for access to the secrets of ChapmanF, and they could have hidden the code to do this in a way that the BBC didn't bother checking.

I heard Priuschat was "free". Careful now.

 

How comprehensive a code audit are you thinking is done by a typical organization that outsources development of a spiffy app?

If you browse with a JavaScript blocker, you're kind of stuck with only the features that run on Priuschat's own computers where they belong, but then there's less to be careful about.

 

OK

 

I was admiring the rhetorical deftness there, but it's also a bit beside the point. So far, I have never had the (dis)pleasure of restoring any system after malware that was targeted at me personally (or at the owner personally of whatever system I had to restore). It's all been opportunistic. Knowing that it was nothing personal still never makes the cleanup and restoration any less of a pain in the butt.

 

If things are that bad, would it not be worthwhile to have a separate device for free/"free" media? An old Android phone that you use just for media apps?

That way, they can't track the important stuff you do on your other devices.

 

Just to add to that....

I used to do a lot of work tracking fraud in China. It involved going to a lot of websites that were riddled with malware and other nasties. To visit these sites, I used a separate, old computer that had nothing of importance to me and nothing confidential on it. Of course I used anti-virus and anti-malware software too, but that was never going to be enough.