This year though, the BBC seriously made the most of the red button service. It also had a section where you could browse the medal winners and see stats from each country. It was especially brilliant for the Olympics this year, with all the sports going on at the same time the BBC had an entire section dedicated to live feeds of pretty much every single event as it happened, all with its own commentary. And with sporting events, the red button lets you choose the games/matches you want to see. The BBC always had the best content - for example after hosting special live gigs on Radio 1, they'd record them and show them in a loop on the red button.

On BBC channels you could view all the headlines and weather etc - very much like teletext but with much more modern visuals. Mostly, as people here have said, it's just things like extra behind the scenes bits or more information on the show. Usually indicated by the red button in the top right corner of the screen. You get to them by pressing the red button on your remote control while watching their channels or certain shows. Eventually other providers caught on, and so did regular channels - all starting to offer their own interactive services. They had an entire interactive section where you could play pretty decent 2D games (usually for a small fee via your phone line) with your remote control and use similar interfaces to view and rent Sky Box Office movies. When Sky TV (satellite provider) launched their Digital service, they were able to add interactivity to some things. Here is an example of a teletext style page - navigation was done with the four coloured buttons (usually shown as a text menu at the bottom of the screen) and by typing in 3 digits for the page you want to go to (you can see them by the side of each headline or category on that screenshot). I believe it was mostly shut down last year. It was free to everyone who could access it.

As people have said already, pretty much every TV remote control comes with red, blue, green and yellow buttons - this was because back before the Internet was popular, we had this service called teletext where you could see news, weather, lottery results and play simple quiz games on your TV.

Play the angry red button