Many people may think it's the best use of the technology, but interactive TV (or ITV) isn't limited to ordering pizzas or flying biplane dogfights on your television. Digital television is heading toward a convergence with computers -- and students, sports fans, news junkies, and anybody with an interest in anything will get more out of television. Nobody really knows how we'll interact with our televisions in the next few years, but TV is never going to be the same.

 
Enhanced TV demo
(Flash 3 required - if you don't have it, download it.)

Digital TV broadcasts are just long streams of bits that can contain any data the broadcaster wants to add to their signal. Each channel has about 19.2 Mbs (that's megabits per second) of data they can add to their broadcast. Most of it will be video and audio, but some of the signal can be other forms of data. Imagine a very fast network connection sending pictures, sounds, multimedia games, and illustrated articles, all related to the television program you're watching. You can still passively watch TV, but you can also customize the experience and make it your own.

The Experiments