This paper discusses the limitations of the DIS standard with respect to large-scale exercises and proposes enhancements to overcome these limitations. It studies the question of whether the futures of DIS and various commercial interactive applications (such as interactive television and telemedicine) are inter-related in such a way as to provide a low-cost, high performance solution for large-scale simulation exercises. By using data obtained from large-scale exercises, such as I/ITSEC 1994 and STOW-E, this paper highlights the trends in network performance. Study of these trends is useful because it indicates current limitations of DIS implementations. This paper next provides an in-depth discussion of the interactivity problems involving system bandwidth, inefficient protocol definitions, and latency. These issues are discussed both in the context of existing applications as well as future commercial applications.