And yet, with BBC America and the Sci-Fi Channel, my UK shows are embarrassingly easy to watch without "magic".

IIRC, Sky has everything pretty soon after it airs. I remember trying to wrangle invitations to my one friend who had a semi-legal Skybox and card so I could watch Stargate and Star Trek pretty much as they aired. (It was quasi-legal because they simply used their old address from when they were stationed at the UK, as opposed to one of those post forwarding services.)

Um... Yeah. TV is very important to me, as you can see.