Earlier this week, plans for a massive online BBC archive seeped out. This afternoon at MipTV-Milia in Cannes, Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of future media and technology, was slated to provide details and update other BBC digital initiatives. (We’re not there in person but the BBC provided his planned remarks.) At the core of it all: the BBC wants to make its on-demand services available on as many platforms as possible. At the same time, it wants to avoid what Highfield calls a “lift and shift” of content and what I suspect we call shovelware.

BBC Archive: The BBC has more than one million hours of video and audio plus supporting notes and scripts. The archive trial—closed to 20,000 consumers—will launch in May and is expected to last up to six months. It’s meant to gather info to use in proposing a “public service on-demand archive” that will require apprval by the BBC Trust and “to see where we should draw the line between a licence fee funded service and a commercial service.” It will gauge interest in various old programs, how people want to see them and when—“‘lean-forward’ exploratory mode similar to web surfing, or as a scheduled experience more akin to TV viewing.” Highfield: “The BBC Archive would be an extension of the BBC’s seven-day catch-up on demand proposals, the BBC iPlayer. As with that proposed service, the Archive journey has been, and will be, a long one. It’s a massive undertaking. Ensuring the right split between license fee funding and commercial funding will be complex.”

—The archive plans are even broader, moving beyond online to IPTV. The BBC will start “a small closed technical trial” to deliver the same service over the internet to a digital terrestrial set-top box connected to a digital television, an effort to bring internet and TV together.