We don't really have true digital, interactive TV here in the States.
There have been numerous trials, most of them more well known for the money that was sunk into them - seemingly without trace. But that doesn't mean that TV isn't evolving in interesting ways.
Take TiVo, for instance. It lets you pause a football game while you're watching it live, take a phone call, and then press play to carry on from exactly where you left off. You don't miss any of the game. The jargon term for this is "time-shifting". While you're on the phone, the TiVo box is digitally recording the signal so that when you continue watching it, it plays from the disk while at the same time recording the remainder of the game to disk. And if you happen to stumble across The Simpsons and tell TiVo that you like it, it will subsequently find every episode of the Simpsons as it airs and record it for you.
TiVo is also the greatest instrument yet devised for skipping TV ads. Forrester Research reckons these devices could be in 14m US homes in the next five years and that could cut "traditional commercial TV viewing" by half. That's scary for quite a few people - Dennis Wharton, chief spokesman for the US's National Association of Broadcasters, for one. "There's been a bargain struck for about five decades between broadcasters and viewers: we'll give you free TV; you'll have to watch advertising every 15 minutes or so. If all commercials are optional or non-existent, we're forced to go to a pay-TV model."
But TiVo is more than a super-zapper. It also allows tracking of viewing patterns and profiling of households and viewers. And that means more targeted advertising, or it will do if the companies advocating it can persuade the American public and politicians that it's worth the inevitable dent in privacy.
The internet has started to force advertisers to devise ads that people want - advertising that has value in itself. And now both the European model of iTV and things like TiVo in the US are forcing the mass marketers whose greatest tool has been TV to start thinking along the same lines.
No more spraying the same thing at millions of people and hoping it's relevant to enough of them to make the cost worthwhile. That has to be a good thing.
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