Over the next 6 months BBC will roll out a trial, giving 20,000 viewers access to radio and TV programmes from the corporation's archives. The trial will make around 1,000 hours of content available to a closed group of 20,000 , with another 50 hours available to anyone to watch or listen to.

"The purposes of the trial... is to inform the BBC's future proposition for a public service on-demand archive service on bbc.co.uk, which will require approval from the BBC Trust , and to see where we should draw the line between a licence fee funded service and a commercial service," says Ashley Highfield, BBC director for Future Media and Technology.