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The BBC will launch its on demand TV Service, BBC iPlayer on July 27 it announced today.

Users who have accessed the iPlayer and downloaded a program will have up to 30 days to watch it. After the program has been viewed it will automatically be deleted. Users will be able to watch promotional clips of shows and link back to the iPlayer, allowing them to download the entire program.

"BBC iPlayer is a free catch-up service for UK license fee payers, your favorite programs 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," said Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media & Technology at the BBC.

The BBC is in talks with a number of possible distribution partners, including MSN, telegraph.co.uk, AOL, Tiscali, Yahoo, MySpace, Blinkx and Bebo.

The BBC said they have plans to add other features over time to the BBC iPlayer, such as streaming on-demand and series stacking which allows users to download episodes from series retrospectively.

The BBC iPlayer is currently in closed testing with around 15,000 people. It will launch in Beta in July and have a full market launch in the fall.

When the BBC iPlayer launches it will include a display settings toolkit for the vision impaired and sign language for the hearing impaired. Subtitles and audio description will be added in the coming months.