I dabbled with free and cheap paid-for proxies which were either injecting javascript or too flaky for live video. I saw a few of those smaller providers, but the initial outlay would have been too risky, because I am convinced the BBC throw a lot of money at residential geolocation, so if they haven't already their IP address blocks will be blacklisted at some point in the near future

interesting about Dubai though, makes me wonder if they have some sort of expat or economic deal with them. if Google thinks you're there, you can bet BBC do too. I discovered they use multiple CDNs and delivery mechanisms as fallback/best effort, which sometimes (but not always) sieved most (but not all) VPN locations in an indeterminate (but authoritatively just) fashion, so perhaps Dubai is whitelisted on one of those. might investigate further at some point if I can swallow some bile first