This is as much to do with their content license agreements as it is BBC being disinterested. Material BBC licenses to distribute, they are limited to the UK, and content BBC licenses to foreign TV presumably can't be also distributed to that same region. There is a service BBC run which allows those outside the UK to stream some content (https://www.britbox.com/us/).

You still can in some places if I recall correctly. Notably not in US due to licensing disagreements (of course).

Like, commonwealth nations? Or just countries too small to bother with the legal fees?

Like, you can download BBC iPlayer (or could) and pay a fee. For UK license fee payers, the app and content is free.

I don't think the content was identical, but it was pretty broad. Some EU countries, maybe Canada?, at least.

smartdnsproxy.com - 2 weeks, no credit card needed. Works perfectly and you don't need to use a VPN, just one of their DNS servers.

I took a look at this, it seems the way it works is when you do a DNS lookup it does a lookup itself and rewrites the IPs before returning to you. It stores a mapping of client IP and rewritten IP to real IP and when it gets a request on the rewritten IP it looks up the original and proxies the request. Pretty cool, but I wouldn't trust it with anything unencrypted. It offers no privacy benefits.

this is showing up as a malicious site.