BBC at one time were paying for all the solus $ky decryption cards... as well as all the other costs associated with providing its services to $ky (BBC were on satellite long before DSO to provide TV coverage in remote parts).
BBC eventually went FTA (2003) to avoid the $ky/NDS encryption costs / solus cards and at the same time were developing what became
freesat in the background. (NB I was there at the time, although the
freesat launch was after my redundancy.) $ky heard about the plans and launched their 'Free Sat from $ky' offering... NB the trademark was registered in 2003
Search for a trade mark - Intellectual Property Office
AFAIK BBC still pay $ky lots for carriage on their EPG and adaptation (albeit now much less than before) {and need to provide teletext subtitles for compatibility with their non DVB compliant boxes}, but get nothing for delivering their PSB services to them (Worldwide may recoup a little via their UKTV pay channels). Even Virgin pay BBC nothing (but at least collect the uncompressed SDI data from the BBC C&M centres at their expense).
BTW $ky have very little say in the
freesat EPG listings / prominence (no more than any other broadcaster/member of
freesat) . NB BBC 'owns' 50%. Certainly they do not 'approve' the freesat EPG; but do have more say in their own platform's EPG.
Both are regulated by Ofcom, though, in terms of fairness, due prominence, charges etc.,. What they do insist on is that new channel launches and significant changes are offline 'sandbox' tested with their adaptation kit in good time, to ensure that they will not cause any disruption to their services; since so much data is cross-carried for both $ky and
freesat.
Anyway all this is way off the original topic of this thread and if we need more in depth discussion, perhaps the posts should be moved into another thread?