There's only so much BBC the world can take.

We don't talk about bbc radio 5

There is a BBC Radio 5. It's sports and news

It's top secret, like the 5th floor in North Korea

Because it split into Radio 5 Live and Radio 5 Sports Extra, which technically means it's Radio 10.

I think BBC3 is also gone.

because bbc news 24

There is - 5 Live

It's called 5 live, it's a sports one

We don't talk about bbc radio 5

there is

Now I'm scared!

(agh, length limit) or at least, as public as anything gets here, IE pay your annual £145 license then have free reign of it... well, a certain subset of it depending on how new your receiver is. My now-ancient TV can't show any of the MPG2 channels (HD, and some SD catchup / local public access type services) and lacks internet connection, as it was one of the first to have a built in receiver... its EPG keeps crashing from having too little memory to hold data for all the channels at once, too. The PVR next to it is a few years old and so can do MPG2 but, despite having a network socket and some "smart" services (mostly now closed down or lacking sufficiently updated apps to continue access), can't show any of the IP-assistant services (like, the transmitter sends a web address and a descramble code, and the box then pulls and decodes video from that address over a broadband link... yeah, sucks if you're in a mobile home and relying on wireless I guess, but they're all junk anyway..)

More worryingly, that kind of stuff is starting to happen here, too. Increasing number of channels I then delete from the list on my TV and PVR after the occasional re-scan of the waveband... just so I'm not annoyed at having to skip over them all the time and have their titles invade my brain. Cable is something we never had as a municipal thing, because we don't really have anywhere that suffers bad enough radio broadcast reception, either because of geography or architecture, to require it. It's always been more of a commercial venture. Still, the influence and competition from both that and satellite, particularly when the early cable services started going to digital IPTV and offering home broadband internet as a unicast sideline to the multicast AV mainline, did at least prompt the transition from the old rather congested 5-channel analogue not-quite-free to air setup to the modern digital setup ... first as a poorly run commercial venture, then when that failed a public one

Ikr

Think of it, at least for the BBC stations (including radio and interactive services) as the original equivalent of the "sign up for a paid membership to remove ads" thing that a lot of websites and particularly streaming services do now, with a cost of a little over £12 per month per household for everything. AND it means fewer ads on the commercial stations too, as the main networks get a little subsidy each from the license authority, and they don't have to pay as much for transmitter rental etc because a lot of the main network maintenance is covered by it (many of the main antenna sites being BBC property, by way of them claiming all the best hilltops years before the other stations even started)... Really, considering how much cable or satellite service charges here, and how it'd likely still come out of my pocket in taxes anyway (where does the money come from to run basic cable services in the US? as far as I know they're largely municipal utilities, so, tax?), it's an OK rate

You forgot R1 extra (urban yoof), R5 extra (weird sports), the local radio stations (which become a joined-up, nameless shadow network overnight) and of course the World Service (sort of like dial up era internet turned into a radio stream, then beamed everywhere via Long Wave AM so that people in North Korea making illicit foreign broadcast receivers from scraps of chicken wire and contraband digital watches can still pick it up...). Just for the latter alone, £145 a year seems like a good deal. Here, plucky DPRK electrician, have a programme about Vladmir Nabakov in a language you can't speak. O world that has such wonders in it.

How! How what? How 2?

You sound worrying like someone who probably thinks ITV is worth giving the time of day to. That or you can afford Sky so easily that you don't even think of how much it costs you per year (hint: way more than the license fee) even though they then STILL have the utter cheek to bombard you with 15 minutes of advertisements over the course of an hour... generally wrapped with supposed content that, if it was printed, I wouldn't bother to even line a bird cage with. Viva Auntie, Viva freeview.

*ITV, Channel 4, and Five ... assuming they've stopped stylising themselves as 5ive...

BBC kids is called Children's BBC (CBBC) we also have Ceebeebies for the under fives. BBC 3 and/or 4 covers the darker side of the Beeb. News24 is the BBC Extreme channel, 24 hours of unadulterated BBC news and weather. It's too extreme for me, I just barely make it a couple of hours past the watershed. (Nothing like a watergate btw)

Because none of those exist in the UK, they're all foreign market efforts, which have cut-up versions of the domestic shows in order to squeeze in adverts...