While perusing a DIRECTV circular, I noticed that they have a feature called Gamelounge, which is a channel on their service that serves a large variety of casual games that viewers play with their remote, effectively (and cleverly) creating a game controller that users are already familiar and comfortable with navigating.
The games themselves consist of well-known titles like Bejeweled and themed games like Samurai Jack (side scrolling action) from these categories:
Card Games
Arcade Games
Word Games
Puzzle Games
Classic Games
Mind Games
Nickelodeon
Mattel Games
Cartoon Network
The last two times I remember something like this happened was with the SEGA Channel and Nintendo's Satellaview, which, if anyone remembers tried to do the same thing, but the key change here is that the focus is one:
Family and Casual Games
instead of:
Rentals of existing (sometimes hard to get) and custom (but tailored for niche fans, i.e. Radical Dreamers [Chrono Trigger Sequel]) games
Which, with the TV being the centerpiece of many family communities these days, it seems like DIRECTV got it right by centering their content around the core community of the cult of commercial television. The thing I'm most interested in is the use of the remote as a game controller, since one of the hurdles of getting new people into games is the wall created by the complexity of the interface device.
Get this straight though, the TV Remote is an already incredibly complex and blocky interface device, but the past few and all future generations will already be familiar with it, creating an interesting paradox as this could be leveraged in the future for more types of game delivery as HDTV (mainly for the bandwidth) becomes prevalent in homes.
By merging TV and Games directly (Transmedia anyone?), it becomes possible to create a whole new generation of gamers that would be able to translate the complexity of navigating the TV Remote (a device that is more obtuse than an XBOX 360 controller!) to that of a console controller.