General Guidance

Update Frequency

The data provided by the BBC’s Radio SPI service should be considered as being definitive. The metadata, logos and URLs contained in the files published using Radio SPI may change periodically. If you are storing this data in a local system, please ensure that you update it at least once every 12 hours but no more than once per minute.

DNS

The BBC may return multiple A records in the DNS response for an FQDN. These may be used for resilience, and a client may follow RFC 1794 and use these multiple A records for resilience. If an AAAA IPv6 record is returned, clients may use this instead of the IPv4 A record. If connection to the IPv6 address fails, the IPv4 should be used as a fallback.

TLS / SSL

Radio SPI and media streams are available over SSL. Where indicated, clients may use SSL to connect to these services, but if they do, they must support at least TLS 1.2. Even if BBC servers currently support older versions of TLS, the BBC reserves the right to disable these at short notice. The BBC may stop supporting legacy plain HTTP in the future.

User-Agent headers

Clients must send, in all requests to the BBC servers, an HTTP User-Agent header which identifies at least:

The name and version number of the device or product
The name and version number of the software components

This is particularly important for the HTTP agent performing media playback, as it can greatly assist in diagnosing problems with playback.

Example of a User-Agent string:

User-Agent: AcmeProduct/4.0 AcmeDASHClient/1.2 curl/7.64.0

For more guidance on constructing User-Agent strings please see section 10.1.5 of RFC 9110.

Query strings

Clients must not add their own query string parameters to URLs, outside of any that might be required by BBC-published URL templates. Additional or invalid query sting parameters may return an error.

Changes to services

The BBC will commit to giving manufacturers a reasonable amount of notice of changes and, where practical, maintain support for legacy APIs for a period to allow manufacturers to change their products to cope with new APIs.