The viewing figure of 2 billion people who watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, on TV indicates that the potential market for interactive multimedia services is many times the 60 million or so people who surf the Internet from PCs. However, the various technologies of multimedia are not always easy to use, may not be interoperable or even stable, and, perhaps like telephony over the Internet, can even challenge a computer nerd. Does industry expect a population of couch potatoes to turn into nerds? Surely not. Without total system design at the national level the ease of interoperability needed for early take-up of interactive multimedia technology in health and education may not be achieved.