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During a speech to the MipTV conference in Cannes, Ashley Highfield, the corporation's director of Future Media and Technology, said that he wants to make iPlayer 'as widely available as possible'.

'Although [Apple's] proprietary and closed framework for digital rights management gives us headaches, it is one of our top priorities to re-engineer our proposed BBC iPlayer service to work on Macs,' he said.

However Mac support is not the top priority.

'We're starting with the biggest available audience: the 22 million people who are broadband connected in Britain,' he said. 'The next biggest audience is three million cable homes. After that, it's Macs, media centres, and smart handheld devices.'

Currently iPlayer allows viewers to watch current programming up to seven days after it was first broadcast. But from next month the BBC will begin test of its Archive project, which will eventually provide iPlayer with access to more than one million hours of archive

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footage, as well as programme notes and scripts.

'It will test what old programmes people really want to see, from Man Alive to The Liver Birds, how they want to see them - full length or clip compilations, and when they want them - in "lean-forward" exploratory mode similar to Web surfing, or as a scheduled experience more akin to TV viewing,' Highfield said.

Highfield also said that iPlayer will not be restricted to the computer desktop: he plans to integrate it with digital terrestrial television services and set-top boxes. Freeview users, for example, will have access via the red button.

The BBC's decision to provide Mac support follows a campaign that included a petition on the Downing Street website and submissions to the the BBC's own consultation process. Industry regulator Ofcom also made its concerns known.

iPlayer has until now been based on Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10 or 11 with DRM, though somewhat ironically it couldn't have a more Mac-like name. Microsoft dropped Windows Media support for Macs In January 2006 but had never included the DRM component in Mac versions of the software. The BBC currently uses the cross-platform Real Player for its Listen Again service for its radio broadcasts and news video clips. Highfield did not say which technology will be deployed in iPlayer for Macs, but Real Player is an option, as its Helix DRM is both Mac and Windows compatible.