The BBC adds that its children's department is a leading exponent for child-safe internet products that reflect the concerns of children growing up in Britain today and works extensively to promote home-grown content. The new service follows user-testing, with the design produced by a combined team of children's interactive experts from BBC Vision and video-on-demand specialists from the BBC's Future Media and Technology division.

The BBC iPlayer extension for CBeebies is just one of a number of new and enhanced services being introduced for young viewers this year, with exciting developments coming soon to the CBeebies Red Button service.

Pressing Red on the CBeebies channel will take viewers into a new and enhanced interactive area mirroring the content on the channel, as well as brand new games featuring CBeebies favourites In The Night Garden and Green Balloon Club.

CBeebies radio is also set to launch later this year on the Red Button service, as well as a new grown-up section containing useful information for parents.

The new design features a 'carousel' making the interactive service simple to use for all ages, and will now be tailored to optimise the performance on whichever platform the viewer is using ie Sky, cable or Freeview.

BBC Future Media and Technology director Erik Huggers said, "The children's BBC iPlayers bring the flexibility of on-demand viewing to the BBC's younger viewers to a more familiar environment – designed specifically for them. We are constantly innovating to improve our audiences' experience of the BBC's first-rate children's programming, and hope CBeebies iPlayer will be a hit with parents and children alike."

BBC Children's controller Richard Deverell says, "Children live in an on-demand age and with the launch of the new BBC iPlayer designed for the under sixes, children can now watch some of their favourite programmes whenever they want and parents have greater flexibility and freedom to choose what their children watch and when. This is why I am so delighted that we are launching the CBeebies iPlayer and I hope it will significantly increase the public value we deliver to this important audience."

The main BBC iPlayer incorporates industry-standard guidance labelling, allowing parents to make informed choices about potentially challenging content as well as the parental guidance lock. This safeguard allows parents/guardians to 'lock' potentially challenging content as well as the parental guidance lock.

This safeguard allows parents/guardians to 'lock' potentially challenging guidance-labelled content, which may then only be accessed by first inputting a user-defined password. This new release is designed from a child's perspective and works irrespective of whether parents have set the password protection system.

Approximately 40 per cent of CBeebies' output is currently available on BBC iPlayer and this will remain the case with the introduction of the CBeebies iPlayer. This is the equivalent of an average of 35 hours a week which includes a mix of first run series and repeats.

The majority of titles will be available for seven days after showing, with some series available in their entirety (series stacked) until seven days after the last episode is transmitted (up to a maximum of 13 weeks and in accordance with permissions and approvals granted by the BBC Trust).