BBC director of future media and technology Ashley Highfield says, "BBC iPlayer is a free catch-up service for UK licence fee payers. Your favourite programmes from all the BBC‘s network TV channels will be available to download over the internet, and watch on your PC without advertising for up to a week after transmission.

BBC Vision director Jana Bennett said, "This is a significant moment, as it heralds a new era when viewers will have the freedom to watch programmes from the BBC‘s linear TV channels when they want.

"It‘s a revolutionary service which offers audiences more value, because from now on they never have to miss out on their favourite programmes – or those that they didn‘t previously have the opportunity to try."

At launch, once viewers have accessed BBC iPlayer at bbc.co.uk/iplayer and have downloaded a programme, they will have up to 30 days in which to watch it. Once watched, the programme file clears itself up by deleting itself.

Users will be able to watch promotional clips of programmes, and link back to BBC iPlayer on bbc.co.uk, enabling them to download the full programme.

The BBC is in discussion with a wide range of potential distribution partners, including MSN, telegraph.co.uk, AOL, Tiscali, Yahoo!, MySpace, Blinkx and Bebo.

Highfield adds, "We are committed to making it as easy as possible to use BBC iPlayer. Developing a version for Apple Macs and Microsoft Vista is absolutely on our critical path. We‘re also committed to making it available on the Television screen, which is why we are delighted to be working with Virgin Media towards a launch on cable later this year. We are hopeful that other TV platforms will follow soon after.

"Our vision is for BBC iPlayer to become a universal service available not just over the internet, but also on cable and other TV platforms, and eventually on mobiles and smart handheld devices. It underpins our Creative Future strategy, to maintain the BBC‘s relevance among all audiences in the digital age."

BBC iPlayer is currently in closed environment testing amongst some 15,000 people. It will go live to the general public in open Beta on 27 July, allowing the number of users to increase over the summer in a controlled manner, before a full marketing launch in the autumn.

In time, extra features will be added to BBC iPlayer, such as streaming on-demand (allowing users to watch a programme straight away), series stacking (which allows users to download episodes from selected series retrospectively) and the highly successful BBC Radio Player.

At launch, BBC iPlayer will include a display settings toolkit for the hard-of-vision and sign language for the hard-of-hearing; subtitles and audio description will be rolled out in the coming months.

Technical development and delivery: BBC iPlayer has been created and developed by the BBC‘s Future Media & Technology division in partnership with Siemens and Red Bee Media.

Red Bee Media is responsible for content ingest, transcoding and quality control. This happens through an automated workflow system, enabling programmes to be quickly re-purposed for BBC iPlayer. Red Bee Media also produces rich metadata tagged to each programme, enabling audiences to search for their favourite shows as well as discover new content.

Siemens is responsible for the delivery technical infrastructure, for applying the digital rights licence and for distributing media to end users via the peer to peer network. VeriSign working through Siemens has delivered the Kontiki Broadband Delivery Service software that enables users to install the BBC iPlayer application on their PC, download, store and play programmes on-demand.

BBC Future Media and Technology development teams, who also develop the bbc.co.uk website, have played a significant role in developing the product - from the search and browse facility, run on Autonomy, to the look and feel and functionality that end users experience on the website and within the application they have installed on their PCs.