Interactive television (ITV) is a new form of residential consumer video service that gives viewers far greater control over the contents of programs than is possible with conventional television. There are substantial technical challenges to offering a ITV service on a large scale, both in content creation and delivery. The paper discusses those challenges and presents a new system architecture for offering ITV, along with a broad range of other interactive video services, to consumers in their homes. A new suite of tools to simplify the creation of compelling interactive programming is also described.>