Nowadays theres better tools for the job. StreamMaster* for example can handle thousands of IPTV sources and let you organise them nicely into something that can be read by Plex, Jellyfin, etc.

*Sadly recently abandoned but still available on github.

Users in the United Kingdom are restricted from tuning in to stations outside of the UK for an indefinite period due to copyright and neighboring rights related matters that require clarification.

Stations situated in the UK continue to be available.

For more information please read the statement in the 'Settings' section."

I suppose that the not public podcasts could be aggregated somewhere, but I'm less of a fan of that, and there's also some technical reasons why this would be more difficult than it was to aggregate these IPTV HLS streams.

Being able to view them by country or whatever is interesting, though I think perhaps less so for podcasts than something like live news, but not a bad idea

I agree the skin lightening soap was weird for me too. Its kind of interesting how people yearn for what they don't have (pale light skin women in the west tanning, tan darker skinned women in the east lightening...)

> The reason for Bernd's depression was revealed in the 85th episode of the series. In his telling: "[...] A long, long time ago I fell in love with a beautiful, slim baguette. She was so unbelievably charming and funny. But unfortunately, my affection was in vain. She only had eyes for this perfect stranger, a multigrain bread. It was so devastating. [...] My heart has been a dry clump of flour ever since."

Late at night (i.e. right now in the US), KiKA plays a "late night loop" starring Bernd.

Yes multicast, however you can't do multicast over the internet. In practise the technology is mainly used in production and enterprise scenarios (broadcast, signage, hotels, stadiums, etc).

Instead big streaming platforms like netflix or twich use CDN boxes installed locally at major ISPs. Also with so much hardware acceleration on modern NICs these days, it's surprisingly easy to handle Gbits of throughput for audio/video streaming.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

It is not likely useful to them in negotiating ad rates, at least not with how advertising is usually bought/sold, because the broadcaster has almost no information (if any) about anyone watching these streams, including if it's even a person. It's possible they could fold it into a more general ad package that places a lot of weight on total view/viewers numbers, but that is a lot less common these days, and when it is done, the rates tend to be much lower

How is that even enforced?

They show the news at the top of every hour so we check in pretty regularly.

If you wanted -- and you had the data, which you probably don't -- you could make the sorting criteria the share of viewers (ie. percentage as opposed to absolute numbers), that way countries with unusually large audiences wouldn't always appear at the top. Though that comes with its own issues.

That's actually what a huge number of the channels on this site are, and I do wish they were labeled and filterable that way.