Local Radio Restrictions

[Merlin]

I've listened to The Legends(Real Radio) on my comp for years. Well last night sat down as usual, logged in clicked to listen live and was surprised to get a message that I was using an unauthorised UK service provider and as such it was illegal for Real Radio to provide me with a listen live service! If I thought this was wrong I was to contact the radio station through their help page. Needless to say it doesn't exist. So sent a message through their contact us link, stating that I was with AOL and have had no problems in the past! So what is the problem? They replied with this:-

Due to licensing restrictions we are unable to allow listeners to accessour stream from outside the UK. See the answer from our FAQ section below... "I'm in the UK and I get a voice coming out of my speakers telling me"The stream is not available outside of the UK", so how do I listen? If you are a UK resident, you will be seeing this because your InternetProvider is routing traffic via another country. AOL are known to dothis. This is also common for large companies to route traffic through a"head office" in another country if they are a particularly largecompany. Unfortunately, licensing restrictions mean we are unable to resolve someof these issues at the moment, but we are constantly looking for newmethods to provide our streams to all UK residents." We are constantly looking at ways around this. We provided an update toour software only yesterday. If I could ask you to keep your eyes onthis and hopefully this will be resolved in the near future. Regards David CelliniDigital Content ProducerGMG Radio Tel: 0191 440 7519Address: GMG Radio, Marquis Court, Team Valley Trading Estate,Gateshead, NE11 0RU

So what do I do now? Do I complain to Aol, I mean I'm paying for a service and I can't even access a local radio station. Did these licencing laws just come in yesterday. Whats going on? Any Ideas?

[Andy Millne]

To be honest, although it's not really AOLs problem you'd be better off switching to a different provider anyway for several other reasons.

[threegee]

http://www.bedlington.co.uk/community/topic/1693-would-the-last-person-to-leave-a-o-l/