This is the first time that we've delivered a service as complicated as BBC iPlayer onto a normal, household set top box or TV set, and we initially restricted the beta to a closed group of users.

Since then many Freesat users have been asking when they'll be able to try it for themselves, and as our testing has been going well we're making the beta product available more widely, and you're invited!

To take part, you'll need a Humax branded Freesat HD or Freesat+ set top box and a broadband connection of at least 1Mbps. You'll also need to connect your set top box to your broadband connection - visit Freesat's website for detailed instructions, which also contains a help video as well.

Once your box is connected, to access BBC iPlayer you just need to:

• Tune into any BBC channel and press the red button


• When the BBC Red Button homepage loads, type in the code 5483 and press OK. You'll see a message that says "Number not found" however don't worry about that.

After a few seconds, BBC iPlayer will appear on screen.

Whilst currently the Freesat version of BBC iPlayer is currently available on Humax set top boxes, it will become available to all Freesat HD set top boxes and Freesat HD TVs as soon as possible over the coming months - including all HD boxes and TVs with Freesat built in from launch. Please note the Freesat SD boxes won't work with BBC iPlayer at any point. In the meantime, if you have a different Freesat device to the Humax equipment then I'm afraid BBC iPlayer is not available.

During the beta period, we'll be working hard to make fixes and improvements and we'll continue to blog about our progress. Naturally we're interested in finding out about your experiences using the service - hopefully all good however if you have any problems, we'd also like to know as well. Just leave us a comment below.

Andrew Bowden is Senior Producer, TV Platforms team, BBC Future Media & Technology.

And it was no different in the early days when the BBC's red button pioneers were trying to work out what their new service would look like.

One idea was the very Ceefax inspired idea I wrote about recently. And with grateful thanks to the fact that no one has cleaned up our servers, I can show you one of the other options...

Read more and comment at the Press Red blog.

Andrew Bowden is Senior Producer, TV Platforms team, BBC Future Media & Technology.

One cupboard contained folders and folders of meeting minutes from 1999. Another contained a draft continuity script for the launch of BBC Choice. Elsewhere we found a box of BBC Sport branded pencils.

My favourite find was a batch of A4 printouts which contained different brand name options for the service we now know as BBC Red Button.

Read more and comment at the Press Red blog.

Andrew Bowden is Senior Producer, TV Platforms team, BBC Future Media & Technology

Some people may find our numbering logic a bit odd - indeed it was one comment made on the Digital Spy forums that inspired me to write this post.

Read more and comment at Press Red.

Andrew Bowden is senior producer, TV Platforms team, BBC FM&T.

No. You're right. This doesn't really look like a famous Italian polymath at all.

In fact this Da Vinci is a room in our office, commonly known internally by a slightly more down to earth name of "The Farm".

Da Vinci is our test farm, and contains about a hundred different set top boxes on which our services are tested - if you've ever built a website and felt the pain of having to test a website in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari AND Konqueror (okay, that last one is probably just me!), then you might want to spare a thought for our test team who have to test on lots of different boxes - all with their own odd quirks and behaviours!

Read more and leave comments on the Press Red blog.

Andrew Bowden is senior producer, TV Platforms team, BBC FM&T.

The first was a problem with Football scores not updating correctly in our sport section.

Read more and comment at Press Red blog.

Andrew Bowden is senior producer, TV Platforms team, BBC FM&T

As well as our What's On posts, there's schedules for our Sport and Music services, available on the BBC website.

And if you've got Freeview, there's now another another way as you'll now find BBC Red Button entries in the electronic programme guide on channels 301 and 302.

Read more and comment at the Press Red blog.

Andrew Bowden is Senior Producer, TV Platforms team, BBC Future Media & Technology

We put one of these up every time a user selects some content that can't be loaded in a few seconds.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't need them at all - we don't want you to have to wait ten seconds or so just to get to the News Multiscreen. However due to the way our service has to be structured, it's an unfortunate necessity.

The reason for that is all to do with bandwidth and positioning.

Read more and leave comments over on the BBC iLabs blog.

Andrew Bowden is a Senior Development Producer for the BBC Red Button Service.

Anyone who has listened to the radio via their Virgin Media or Freeview box will already be seeing their radio - and on Tuesday 30 September, we launched our first radio service on the Freesat platform too.

Read more and comment at the BBCi Labs Blog.

Andrew Bowden is Senior Producer, TV Platforms Team, BBC Future Media & Technology.

...it needs to be ready for an unknown date in Spring 2008...

...the hardware it needs to run on is just in the specification stage...

...and it's a highly important project that lots of people are watching.

Well, the job of helping to launch the BBC's interactive TV services on the new Freesat platform wasn't sold to me in quite those terms eight months ago (although I think the term "exciting challenge" was used somewhere...).

But those words do sum up the reality of building BBCi on the first new digital TV platform in seven years.

As Senior Producer, working within the FM&T TV Platforms team, I realised the scale of the task in hand, but with the stirring words of Managing Editor, John Denton, ringing in my ears (maybe it was John who said "exciting challenge"?), the team got on with facing the many challenges ahead.

One of the biggest was improving the user experience. BBCi has grown a lot since it first became available to OnDigital users nine years ago. The full service covers a range of text- and video-based services - from reading the news headlines for your area through to choosing your court at Wimbledon - and it now reaches 11 million viewers a week. With Freesat offering HD and more and more people buying big screen TVs, we needed to make sure the new service looked its best.

Not surprisingly, we weren't able to build everything for Freesat in the little time we had available. If you own a Freesat set-top box and press red on a BBC channel you will notice that things are a little cut down. The service consists of News, Sport, Entertainment, Business and Community News. The Weather service will be available mid-May.

An enormous amount of work has gone on behind the scenes just to get the basic service working.

So, we had to build something new. Thankfully, our technical team know a bit about MHEG. It's used to power interactive services on Freeview, and this did help us. While technical differences between Freeview and Freesat meant that we couldn't simply re-use our Freeview code, our technical team could re-use code in some areas.

As with any codebase which has grown up over nine years, there were many areas which could be improved on, and the chance was taken to make some improvements which, while slightly slowing development down in the short term, would give us a huge benefits in the long term - enabling us to roll out future releases quicker and simpler than we'd been able to in the past.

One of those improvements was the use of Redhat Package Manager (RPM) to deploy our code to the live servers. (For those who aren't Linux users, RPMs are used to install, remove or update programmes on many Linux distributions.)

For many years, we've used a variety of deployment methods from interactive scripts, through to simply giving the deployment team a great big list of commands to execute - for big projects it would often take a day or two to complete the installation. The new RPM method, which we've been increasingly using on a number of projects recently, simplifies things enormously.

Another improvement we have introduced is automated testing, and Freesat is the first BBCi platform to be completely tested in this way. Our test team has written something like 3,000 different tests which are run every time a member of the technical team checks code into the code repository. Very quickly, it's possible to see whether a code change has accidentally broken something else in the service.

The automated tests cover all number of things, from checking all the colours used on screen, making sure that pressing the yellow button always takes you back, and that menus all work correctly. They complement the manual testing by our test team, and help ensure preventable bugs are rarely seen. And not just for this project team - the suite of tests developed will be used for years to come.

One of our biggest problems on the project, though, was simply down to hardware. The project started in September 2007 at a point when there were no Freesat set-top boxes available. The code, written on normal PCs, is played out internally. We have development TV environments for all our platforms, allowing the team to view and test code on a normal set-top box and TV.

However with the lack of top boxes, we had nothing to test the code against. Instead we used a number of "reference receivers". These are basically specially-made Linux PCs in a slimline desktop case with TV cards, infrared receivers and remote controls. Installed on the hard drive was a copy of the software used to display MHEG that will be used in the normal set-top boxes.

While the reference receivers weren't perfect, when we did test the new code on proper set-top boxes, we were pleasantly surprised at how few problems were found with what had been written.

The project wasn't purely technical, however. At the same time, we also took the opportunity to give BBCi a "lick of paint", with a new, lighter colour scheme, and a number of little enhancements including a new "scrollbar" which indicate how many pages of text there are in a story or on a table.

While the launch may have happened, there's still a lot more to be done - adding the News Multiscreen, Travel, Children's services and more. First up on the blocks will be the BBC's interactive service for this year's Olympics: the starting gun has already been fired and the team is on the way.

And if you've already got Freesat, or if you're just about to get it installed, do press red and let me know what you think.

Andrew Bowden is Senior Producer, TV Platforms Team, BBC Future Media & Technology.