ASHLEY HIGHFIELD has seen the internet revolution from the beginning. When the BBC’s director of new media and technology was managing websites for Flextech, the broadcaster behind Living TV, in the late 1990s, great excitement greeted the booking of the first online advert, he recalls. “It was for £5,000,” he says. “We were so pleased, we went out and had a team celebration. The bill turned out to be for £6,000 — so we ended up losing money.”

Times have changed in the internet business and Highfield is now running the BBC’s £80 million online operation. When he arrived, nearly five years ago, bbc.co.uk was attracting 3.4 million users in the UK and had a million page impressions a month. Today, there are 16 million unique users from the UK each month, eyeing 2.5 billion pages.

Given that kind of growth, it is not surprising that online has become the most important growth area for the Beeb. Highfield reports to Mark Thompson, the Director-General, and ranks on a par with Jana Bennett, the BBC’s director of television. “When I arrived the medium carried a very small audience,” he says. Now he is central to the BBC’s future.

Highfield, a computing graduate, will not take credit for the explosive growth of the service, but says he has been responsible for “moving the money around”, directing resources to areas such as children’s content, where the online audience has now surpassed that of TV.

He has survived, also, a rap from a government review led by Philip Graf, which required the BBC to close five sites that were too similar to commercial rivals. “It affected only a tiny percentage,” says Highfield, “and the punchline was that Graf could not see an overall negative market impact.”

Last month in Edinburgh, Thompson, chose to announce plans for MyBBCPlayer. From next year, it will offer a seven-day archive of all the BBC’s programming, funded partly by cash coming from Thompson’s programme of 3,800 job cuts.

It is a major exercise and will be preceded by a consumer trial, to begin later this month. The Beeb believes it has developed a unique set of technologies to allow mass broadcast online, and needs to start testing them with a panel of 5,000 consumers. Highfield believes that people want to watch TV on their computers. “You wouldn’t believe it, until you see the statistics,” he says.

MyBBCPlayer will feature three new elements. There is rights management software, supplied by Microsoft, which will ensure that when people download an episode of EastEnders, for example, it becomes unusable seven days later, protecting the long-term value of the show for the rights holder.

There is special technology, called Geographic IP, for those in the know, which ensures that the BBC programmes can be watched only by people with UK web addresses. Supplied by a company called Quova, Highfield says it is “surprisingly accurate”. The idea is to ensure that sports rights, for example, are not shown freely overseas. It also gives the BBC the chance sell advertising internationally, which it already does in TV.

Work has also been done to ensure that MyBBCPlayer can cope with demand, using a technique that enlists the help of home computers without their owners knowing. “The first person who downloads Top Gear would get it from us,” Highfield says. “But when people subsequently click on the link, they might get it from the person’s computer down the street — from somebody who has already downloaded the program on their computer.”

Known as peer-to-peer technology, and supplied by Kontiki, Highfield believes it is the first large scale use of the technique in broadcasting. If it works, he hopes to “share the technology” with the rest of the broadcasting industry, arguing that the exercise amounts to public venture capital.

The BBC also plans to help consumers buy music or tickets online. “It seems fairly strange to have a Proms site, featuring the concerts, but where you could not buy tickets,” Highfield says. The idea is to provide a link to vendors, favouring none, which sounds like a step to becoming a general internet portal like Yahoo!.

“Well, we’re not going to set up an eBay; we’re not going to provide e-mail services or own video search technology,” Highfield says. So, what does he want to achieve? “By 2008, when switch-over (to digital TV) begins,” he says “I want internet television to be a viable alternative to satellite, Freeview and cable.”

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