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With broadband and usage of the Internet at an all-time high, the promise of online services with downloadable content, video on demand and interactivity, all displayed on your TV set instead of a computer screen, are finally being fulfilled on a global scale.

Early versions of TV based online services include Viatel and Teletext in Australia, and Minitel in France. Minitel was a success because each household was issued a computer terminal which gave you access to a phone book, ecommerce, chat rooms, messaging and other services. Everyone had it, good content was available and the Internet wasn’t around yet. 

In Australia, the Viatel service offered the same types of functions, but as terminals weren’t provided by the phone companies, it never took off. Teletext is still available on televisions in Australia, but unless you’re into horseracing, few people I know ever bother with Teletext as virtually all the information you can get from it is available, at much faster speeds, much prettier graphics and high resolution text through your browser. Still, Teletext is a real online service that a surprisingly big number of people should be able to access it with a modern TV, if they even know it’s there!

The other big online service is obviously the Internet itself. Now that you can easily plug modern computers into any flat screen TV or projector using a standard VGA cable (or a DVI cable if the screen supports it and your computer also has it) and get the big screen experience any time. Computers running Windows XP (with or without Media Centre Edition), a version of Windows Vista, an iMac or a Linux box can be plugged into your big TV and you can do anything you want.

Play games, surf the web, download music, movies and TV shows legally (for Windows users BigPond now offers paid downloads of top BBC programs such as Dr Who, The Office and a range of others along with the movie download service they started a few months ago), use your computer as a digital media jukebox, watch and record live TV and more.

But going online and getting information is no longer just done through computers. Selected mobile phones from Nokia and Samsung can be connected to your TV now, while future Windows Mobile smartphones will also have this capability, transforming your phone into a connected set-top box, browser, media player, emailer, big screen video conferencing device and more.

Console based online services have been growing over the past few years, although until now more slowly than the growth of the Internet itself. They've started moving away from their purely game oriented roots and have branched out, offering many capabilities only a modern computer could equally offer.