“Increasingly hedge funds are in the game of taking these qualitative data sets and turning them into quantitative trading signals,” said Stephen Hansen, a professor of economics at Imperial College Business School in London, who has studied the impact of monetary policy on financial markets.

Computational linguistics has advanced to the point that an eight-second head start would be more than enough time to digest an audio feed, extract relevant information, convert it into a trading signal and execute a trade based on that information, Mr. Hansen said.

“You could call eight seconds really a long time in this world,” Mr. Hansen said.

The European Central Bank in September started providing an audio feed with less of a delay to limit the ability of external companies to claim that they could get a jump on the widely available public feeds.

The Federal Reserve said Thursday that it sought to make its news conferences as widely available as possible and, to that end, streamed the events directly and through news organizations. A Fed spokesman added, however, that in light of the Bank of England report, the Federal Reserve would review its practices.

Bloomberg said that it was the manager of the Bank of England’s video feed and that it made it available to other news providers. The bank did not identify the supplier of the audio feed, but said that it had disabled the supplier’s access. “As a result, the third-party supplier did not have any access to the most recent press conference and will no longer play any part in any of the bank’s future press conferences,” it said in a statement.

“The bank operates the highest standards of information security around the release of the market sensitive decisions of its policy committees,” the statement added. “The issue identified related only to the broadcast of press conferences that follow such statements.”

The disclosure came before the bank’s release of its periodic monetary policy statement on Thursday, in which it announced that it was keeping its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 0.75 percent.