Keeping abreast with the latest technology, the iPod-owning monarch's festive broadcast will be available to download from the royal family's website on Christmas Day.

Listeners who subscribe to the podcast in advance will automatically receive the recording at 1500 GMT on Monday.

The decision to release a podcast version, alongside the traditional television and radio broadcasts, is an apt illustration of the theme of the 80-year-old's message this Christmas.

"The queen's broadcast this year focuses on the relationship between different generations, what old and young have to offer each other, how all faiths highlight the need to nurture and guide young people, and to encourage respect for elderly people," her Buckingham Palace official residence said.

Despite her age, Queen Elizabeth is no stranger to modern technology -- she bought an iPod last year and her second son Prince Andrew gave her a mobile phone and taught her how to use it in 2001.

She also sent her very first e-mail in 1976 from an army base and became an Internet millionaire during the dot.com boom in the late 1990s.

The Christmas broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth in which Queen Elizabeth speaks from the heart, a rare occasion where she does not need to seek the advice of her ministers.

A Yuletide institution, the 10-minute broadcast is televised on December 25 at 3:00 pm (1500 GMT) in Britain, as many families are recovering from their traditional turkey lunch.

It is broadcast at convenient local times across the 53-nation Commonwealth, a successor to the British Empire which encompasses around a third of the world's countries and a quarter of the world's population.

This year's broadcast was recorded at the historic Southwark Cathedral in central London, where the queen witnessed a funeral blessing last month for a native American chief buried there without ceremony some 270 years ago.

The cathedral's bishop has recently been in bother for an apparently alcohol-fuelled stagger home from a Christmas party, in which he lost his possessions and reportedly broke into a car and began hurling toys around.

It is thought unlikely the queen will refer to this incident in her annual message.

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