The reason I went looking for this thread was not to vote, but to let everyone know that a new version of the Anthology has recently appeared.
The original TV version was the seriously edited version of The Beatles Anthology. The LaserDisc set was a more detailed version. The DVD set mimic'ed the LaserDisc but added true 5.1-channel audio. Then the Anthology book was the unabridged version but (obviously) without any music. A very very long book which, like the TV, LaserDiscs and DVDs, contained no narration but instead only the words of the Beatles and their associates.
Now, very surprisingly, Apple has apparently released an audio version that is close to the Anthology book in length. It's limited to mp3-quality stereo audio but it is much more extensive than any recorded media released previously. There are 18 (!) episodes running between 1 hour and 18 minutes to 2 hours each. A rough calculation is the total length of all 18 episodes is more than 27 hours.
I ran though some of the India / White Album episode and there is significantly more of the Esher Demos than what was included in the original Anthology DVDs, including John Lennon's original words for Sexy Sadie (warning for those who care - no censoring of the potentially objectionable words has been used in this Anthology Revisited set). As you would expect, the Esher Demo audio in Anthology Revisited is significantly cleaner than what is available on the various versions of the Esher Demos that exist on Amazon and eBay.
You can find the full 18 episode set at:
http://anthologyrevisited.podbean.com/
Supposedly the set is also available as podcasts at iTunes but I can't find it under "The Beatles Anthology Revisited" or any other search I tried.
Thanks to Wogblog for the locations of the The Beatles Anthology Revisited set.
So, that leaves the question of why did this extended edition suddenly appear at the end of 2015? In the past this has been done by Apple Corps to gauge interest in a possible future release. For instance, Beatles music videos started appearing unannounced on YouTube for about a year before the Beatles 1+ set was announced. So, this could be a prelude to an extended Anthology set being released on Blu-Ray (if so, please please me and let it be the original 5.1-channel mixes).
Or, the other possibility is they looked at transferring the Anthology work to Blu-Ray and realized it didn't transfer from standard definition to high definition well and so they decided to release the extended audio instead since they wouldn't have a product. Of course, they could then deny that they ever had a Blu-Ray in the works. Apple Corp works in mysterious ways sometimes.
A third possibility is that this takes care of a lot of E.U. copyright concerns for unreleased versions of songs since they are included in the "bed audio" in the 27+ hours. The Anthology Revisited set is copyrighted and therefore those bed songs are now included in that copyright.
In the meantime, enjoy all of the new Beatles audio. BTW, for those who would like to download the mp3's, there is a download button below the play button for each of the episodes.
Happy New Years!
Andy