New British films and a wealth of archive and other material will be made available from next week by the British Film Institute on a new internet platform.

The "BFI Player" will help meet complaints that home-grown film is hard to find away from London. The player, accessible throughout the UK from 9 October, will be optimised for PCs, Macs and tablets, with a mobile app on the way.

Clio Barnard's acclaimed debut fiction feature, The Selfish Giant, will be unveiled on the platform on 25 October, the same day as it is released in UK cinemas. This film, co-developed and financed by the BFI Film Fund, was selected as best European film in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes this year. Same-day released films like this will cost £10 for 30 days' access.

As well as new films, the player will carry a wealth of other material, including much treasured footage from the BFI's world-class archive. This will include all 28 hours of the remarkable film shot by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon that provides one of the few cinematic records of life in Edwardian Britain outside the capital. Standard-definition films will cost £2.50 and HD titles £3.50.

Over the next five years, 10,000 films will be digitised, and an attempt will be made to give the public a say in which ones will be chosen. The original film stock will however be retained, as some detail is lost in transfer and doubts persist about the durability of digital storage.

A newly restored version of Epic of Everest, a record of the 1924 expedition that cost the lives of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, will become available on 18 October, the same day as its theatrical release and its screening as the London film festival's Archive Gala.

Most of the thousand-plus items available at launch will be free. This material will embrace shorts, interviews with directors and screenwriters, talks, Q&As, profiles of film-makers, discussions, masterclasses, documentaries about film-making and red-carpet coverage of events that will include the London film festival, which also opens on 9 October.

"Today is a real milestone for the BFI," said chairman Greg Dyke at the launch of the player on Wednesday. "In its 80th year we're about to make the boldest move we've made since the National Film Theatre opened 60 years ago." More than £100,000 has been spent on the project this year, and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport will be putting in an extra £500,000 on top of the BFI's regular grant.

Inevitably, the platform's arrival will raise concerns for the arthouse cinema and DVD industries, which have until now been the main route to market for new special-interest films. Other video-on-demand players, like Netflix and LoveFilm, have so far concentrated on mainstream fare.

Dyke told the Guardian: "Cinema-going is about something else: it's about a shared experience, it's about watching it somewhere else with someone, so I don't think cinema-going is threatened." However, he added: "Whether you ever get through the day-and-date stuff [same-day release] is a really interesting question."

The BFI's director of digital, Edward Humphrey, said that the new player's quality would match that of DVD, if perhaps not that of Blu-Ray. But he added: "There are very different reasons for buying a DVD. It's all about ownership."

Industry-standard digital rights management will protect the player's content against piracy. According to Humphrey: "The UK film industry leads the world in digital innovation, and we hope the BFI Player will quickly become an essential element in the distribution models of tomorrow."