In this paper we describe how content-based analysis techniques can be used to provide much greater functionality to the users of an interactive TV (iTV) device. We describe several content-based multimedia analysis techniques and how some of these can be exploited in the iTV domain, resulting in the provision of a set of powerful functions for iTV users. To validate our ideas, we introduce an iTV application we developed which incorporates some of these techniques into a simple set of user features, in order to demonstrate the usefulness of content-based techniques for iTV. The contribution of this paper is not to provide an in-depth discussion on each of the individual content-based techniques, but rather to show how many of these powerful technologies can be incorporated into an interactive TV system. © 2009 IEEE.