What’s better than BBC’s iPlayer? get_iplayer of course, a Perl script that rips programmes to your local machine.
I now have get_iplayer set up with cron to download TV programmes that I’m interested in (have a guess from the list below):
0 3 * * * cd Desktop && get_iplayer -l --nopurge --get Beatle 30 3 * * * cd Desktop && get_iplayer -l --nopurge --get Brooker 0 4 * * * cd Desktop && get_iplayer -l --nopurge --get Japan 30 4 * * * cd Desktop && get_iplayer -l --nopurge --get Horizon 0 5 * * * cd Desktop && get_iplayer -l --nopurge --get Buzzcocks
Update
Everyone points out in the comments that get_iplayer has a --pvr
option that makes this even easier.