NP2900 - This station is not available in your country

[hbaerman]

Hello,

since a couple of month I'm struggling with a problem with my NP2900.

Currently I live in Shanghai and bought a Philips NP2900 to listen to my loacal German radio stations.

The NP2900 was working nicely for nearly a year, however, since March 2012 my NP2900 stopped playing any non-chinese radio stations and comes back with a message spoken in English 'This station is not available in your country'.

Unfortunately I only have this problem with the NP2900. On another wireless radio from another manufacture I can play all foreign radio stations, same is true for my PCs and iPADs.

Therefore I must assume as it is neither a problem with my internet connection nor the chinese firewall that this has to do with the Philips NP2900.

I already wrote to Philips a couple of times, but their Support Center were not able to help and passed the problem to their experts. That is now 4 months ago and haven't heard anything since.

Has anybody experienced similar issue and know how this can be fixed ?

It is really frustrating, because I have already reset the NP2900 several times, connected to different internet connections,
but it always comes back with the same error message.

I would be glad, if anybody could at least give me an idea on what else I could do to get this fixed.

We already considering throwing the NP2900 away and replace it with a device from another manufacturer as this seems to be a specific Philips problem.

Thanks in advance for any hints.

[Blechtrottel]

Sir,

I think you are haunted by the famous China Green wall.
I've tried the same ...

If I've the unit in HK all works fine. If I do move over the river to the mainland, then it won't work.

You say other devices work ...

Well do they also use Radiotime (or now called tune-in). Did you try to use tune-in on your PC ? Same issue ?

If you list the stations you want to listen to, I could help out with providing a direct link to that station.
(you can add that one via MyMedia of Club Philips).

Which devices works ? Using vTuner ?

[hbaerman]

Sir,

I think you are haunted by the famous China Green wall.
I've tried the same ...

If I've the unit in HK all works fine. If I do move over the river to the mainland, then it won't work.

You say other devices work ...

Well do they also use Radiotime (or now called tune-in). Did you try to use tune-in on your PC ? Same issue ?

If you list the stations you want to listen to, I could help out with providing a direct link to that station.
(you can add that one via MyMedia of Club Philips).

Which devices works ? Using vTuner ?

Thanks for the response.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one facing that problem, but unfortunately I still cannot get to the bottom of it.

Because my first assumption was also that this was caused by the fanous China Firewall, but still doesn't explain why all other devices I tested are working fine apart from my Philips NP2900.

After your mail I checked my PC using both tune-in as well as vTuner and both work fine, no issues and no weird error messages at all.

Therefore I'm still struggling to understand why only the Philips NP2900 is causing that strange message.

You mentioned that you could help with a workaround using the station directly without going via tune-in.
The two stations I'm interested in would be:

Radio WDR2
Radio Bonn/Rhein-Sieg

If you could provided me with the direct link to these two stations I would really appreciate this.

In addition some simple instruction on how to get them onto the NP2900 would be much aprreciated.

Thanks, Horst

[hbaerman]

After your mail I checked my PC using both tune-in as well as vTuner and both work fine, no issues and no weird error messages at all.

I need correct my statement from yesterday, because when I tested tune-in and vTuner my VPN tunnel was still active, which meant I was bypassing the Chinese Firewall and not using a Chinese IP address.

Without VPN I could recreate the problem on my PC and it seems this is coming from the service provider which Philips is using for internet radio (Radiotime = tune-in) in China.

It seems that tune-in has implemented geo-blocking in China at the end of March which is causing the message on my NP2900 'This station is not available in your country'.

The sad thing is that I'm in touch with the Philips Service team for nearly 4 months now and they didn't even tell me that the problem is caused by the internet service provider they use for China. They even wanted me to send in the device for repair, as they felt the device must be faulty. Not very customer friendly...

My question now is: Is there a workaround to not use the tune-in service to receive internet radio for non-chinese radio stations.

I tried to put in the URL directly into myMedia, but the NP2900 cannot connect to the server, at least that is what the message says ' The server is currently not available, please try again later'.

Not sure whether this is caused by me using a wrong URL format or whether it is a time-out caused by the NP2900 which cannot connect to the server within a certain time limit.

Are there some instructions somewhere, how exactly I need to put in the URL entry into myMedia ?

If somebody could give me a detailed example, which works, so that at least I can eliminate that potential issue.

Thanks very much for any help, much appreciated

Horst

[klauzser]

A friend of mine asking exactly the same thing and having the same problem just like you two. I hope there is an answer for this as he already gave up.

[Philips - Remko]

Dear Users,

"TuneIn is complying with Chinese government regulations, which has resulted in us limiting our service in China to Chinese stations only. This means that all devices providing the TuneIn service in China will play Chinese-only content. All TuneIn functions (e.g. "search" and "browse") will continue working seamlessly for Chinese listeners; it is only the content that is affected by this change. As with all countries and territories, we are adding stations and programs daily, so our Chinese content offering will expand over time. We apologize for this inconvenience."

Kind regards,

[hbaerman]

Dear Philips-Remko,

I heard this argument now a couple of times from Philips, but knowing the Chinese government being normally very rigerous when it comes to governance regulations, I still don't understand that they do not block any other method of accessing foreign radio stations.

I still can use my PC, my iPhone, my iPad as well as Internet Radios from other manufacturers to listen to foreign radio stations, only Philips's service provider seems to be blocked, how can that be...

Not quite sure what Philips's motivation is, but this is not the way to build customer loyality...

Philips rather forces people to buy competitor products, as they can't or are not willing to deliver
the service wanted by customers. Why should anybody buy an internet radio and the only thing you can do with it is listening to local radio station in Chinese language...

Similar to other customers, I probably should give up on Philips, throw the NP2900 away and buy a new internet radio from another manufacturer which also works in China.

A very frustrated customer

[kwinnie]

I still can use my PC, my iPhone, my iPad as well as Internet Radios from other manufacturers to listen to foreign radio stations, only Philips's service provider seems to be blocked, how can that be...

are you using VPN for this? if not can you give a hint on what the 'other manufacturers' are? appreciate if you can send me a pm if you dont want to name it publicly. i m from china also maybe i can give it a try. thanks a lot.

[hbaerman]

No, I'm not using VPN for this.

On the PC I just use the URL like 'http://wdr2.radio.de/' and I can listen to a local German radio station.

I could alternatively use the radio stations direct URL e.g. 'http://wdr2.de' which works also fine.

Same is also possible on iPAD or iPhone without VPN.

Apart from the Philips NP2900 I also own a internet radio from PURE which also works fine, no issues with the Chinese government.

Seems that they must have better a relationship to the Chinese government, because their service provider is not blocked by the Chinese government and I can listen to any foreign radio station I like.

For whatever reason Philips can't provide the same service.

[kwinnie]

using my home wifi i can access some German radio station as well. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/germa...418080533?mt=8

are you also using your home wifi? have you tried using 3G?

[hbaerman]

Yes, I also use my home wifi, which works with all devices I have apart from the Philips NP2900.

It also works with 3G on my iPAD or iPhone, no issues...

Still do not know, why the NP2900 can't connect to an URL directly bypassing the non-functioning connection via the tune-in service provider (my current assumptionis that it is a timeout issue, because going to the URL takes a little longer until the connection is established).

Maybe somebody else has expereince with that abd give me some advice...

[kilians]

I stepped in the same trap.
Device worked beautifully in Germany but refuses service here in China.

No help from the Philipps support.

Should not be too hard to modify the firmware in a way that the URL of the radio station stream can be entered directly. Maybe some negative product reviews might get Philipps to wake up.