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Thing is that the BBC recently did a deprivation study where they invited people to opt out of using *ANY* BBC service and the BBC would refund their license fee for the period of the study.

This was of course offered to a self selecting group of people who thought the license fee was a waste of money. I for example would not be interested in taking part in such a study period.

The result was after just nine days of being deprived access to any BBC service 69% of the sample group of people who though the license fee was a waste of money and would rather not pay it did a complete U turn and where now happy to pay.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news...

Personally, I always picture it liuke this

Hmm the Radio times episode listing for the first episode seems to disagree.

This story has been evolving throughout most of the day. RadioTimes posted a story, rather late UK time.

"BBC Worldwide will put the previously lost episodes from different stories – both believed to be from the Patrick Troughton era – for sale on digital platforms such as iTunes from Wednesday, RadioTimes.com understands."

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-10-06/doctor-who-newly-discovered-lost-episodes-to-be-released-for-sale-this-week?ref=Article.RelatedNews

Also, John Hurt played an unknown past incarnation of the doctor, hence, Matt Smith is actually at least the 12th doctor.

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/John_Hurt
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-07-04/doctor-who-the-identity-of-john-hurts-mysterious-doctor-finally-revealed

Maybe not all of them

http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/channels.dat

But I see a fair chunk of them here. (I don't have cable, and I don't care enough to enumerate them all).

...even though it's their commercial, for profit arm: http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/

All funding for the BBC comes from the UK tv licence and the sales of programming and other commercial activity (e.g. selling Dr. Who and publishing magazines such as the Radio Times)

The BBC is controlled by the BBC Trust (formally the BBC governors) and according to its charter is "free from both political and commercial influence and answers only to its viewers and listeners"

The BBC added free to air distribution of its programming over satellite in order to provide maximum access to its services to its viewers. One of the side effects of this is that the BBC channels can be received with standard DVB-S equipment across most of western Europe.

This is the reason that people are angry with the iplayer situation. It artificially restricts the service to Windows users and prevents full access by all of the licence paying population of the UK. This is completely the opposite of the satellite case where reception is open to others extremely outside the borders of the UK to ensure that UK licence payers have access to the service (note it is possible to receive this as far away as Bulgaria and beyond, so we are not talking about a small over-spread here!

Here in the UK we don't have any of these problems of TV listing availability and complicated html parsing scripts which break every week. The BBC have a special web page just for XMLTV downloads, and it doesn't just cover BBC channels, but practically every channel you can receive in the UK (check the channels.dat file for a full list). The only restriction is that the data can only be used for private non-commercial purposes.

Of course, most of this is probably being paid for from our TV license fees which I know many Americans regard as being a terrible communist plot (some funding may come from the cover price of the Radio Times magazine).

Not just BBC America.

The ones used by mythtv are not on the bbc site itself, it's part of the Radio Times (the BBC commercial listings magazine).

http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/channels.dat
http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/(channelnum).dat

The format is tailored for the xmltv project on sourceforge. Oddly, and rather irritatingly, there doesn't seem to be any RADIO times in there.

1) The BBC home service, paid for by the license fee. This aims to give independant quality broadcasting to the public in the UK - and only there. See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/running/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/licencefee/ It is based in Broadcasting House.

2) The BBC World Service is a free, separate organisation that broadcasts to the rest of the world (theoretically not - as far as I remember - to the UK). It has its own news organisation and was previously based in Bush House, although it has recently moved. It is funded only by government grant, not licensing fees.

3) The commercial branch of the BBC is self-supporting. They make shows and sell them, and have various other activities.

(I'm afraid I can't point out links to everything in this comment, most of it coming from family members who worked in the BBC)

macdo10

Except that they don't quite seem to get it yet. They are offering here some videos from this car programme which apparently didn't quite make it to air,