British Television has had a text service for a long time. This is usually linked to one of the four main channels you can get over broadcast, and is a menu of news, weather, and some advertising. The format is reminiscent of the BBS days of the '80s, all text menus, simple button press navigation. It's handy to chatch up on the news mid-day or grab a quick weather or traffic report.

On Sky TV, the sattelite service in the U.K., they've used these functions to give you much more interactive TV features. The news channels allow you to go into an eight-channel multi-screen format, with a text sidebar and a ticker of your choice. Other options on the menu include some inter-active games and such, and the ability to read eMail from AOL, Yahoo, and a couple of other services (not MSN).

Obviously, you need to have some sort of uplink for this to function; the Sky box uses the phone line that it makes PPV reports with, the same thing U.S. sattelite systems all have.

I haven't bothered to go all the way into this - the phone line's disconnected from the box except for set-up - and I can imagine that if you wanted to reply to mail using a TV remote would be a pain, but I think it's pretty cool that they have these options.

Who knows, some day the U.S. might catch up.