You can also load the content with cURL, if file_get_contents insn't enabled on your server.
Example:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,"http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/sport/0/football/rss.xml?edition=int");
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$items = simplexml_load_string($output);