(FORTUNE Magazine) – "Interactive television." The phrase seemed to arrive straight from Tomorrowland, part of a TV future in which everything from the movie of your choice to pizza delivery would be accessible via your remote. The press said it would happen, the smart money bet it would happen, and because of the Internet, of course, it didn't happen.

Or maybe just not yet. Even after expensive flops such as the Time Warner Full Service Network trials in Orlando during the mid-'90s (Time Warner is the parent of FORTUNE's publisher), iTV never vanished. It just gestated. These days it lives on in the form of TV-based Net service--WebTV--or in a modified form, such as Replay and TiVo, digital devices that can locate and record shows you didn't even know you wanted to watch.

By defining iTV as including everything from AOLTV to Microsoft's WebTV to Excite@Home's cable modems (which aren't iTV per se, but provide infrastructure for it), market analysts at Datamonitor peg iTV use at an astoundingly high 9.9 million U.S. households last year. The surprising part is that the company's analysts expect that number to more than triple by 2003, to 34.4 million U.S. households--and 67 million including Europe.

The next generation of iTV will continue to splinter. Some services will offer only the Net via TV, while others will offer the equivalent of AOL--proprietary services and content. Most will fall in between.

AOLTV and Microsoft's WebTV will duke it out in the tiniest of the iTV niches: the Net piped through TV without interacting with it. Datamonitor expects that will make up just 10% of the iTV market by 2003.

The winning models will come, Datamonitor predicts, from News Corp. and the as-yet-unconsummated marriage of Vivendi and Universal. The former provides OpenTV, a proprietary service, to its BSkyB satellite-TV subscribers, who can buy groceries or books while they choose the camera angles of the soccer match they're watching. In France, Vivendi's cable carrier, Canal+, has a similar service called Mediahighway, which plans to integrate Net programming languages such as HTML and Java into the set-top box. Datamonitor expects systems like OpenTV to reach 9.6 million households by 2003, with hybrid systems like Canal+'s reaching 18.8 million. The dream of ordering pizza through your TV may be in your future after all.