I hope they won't kill it, but you can experience it even leaner on: https://teletekst-data.nos.nl/webplus?p=101. It's my preferred way of quickly checking the news in The Netherlands, and it works on all devices.
bschne
In Switzerland, Teletext somehow proved popular enough you can now access the content (with the same nostalgic look and feel, modulo some advertising) online and on a mobile app.
In my view Teletext has a great property: A single page is short. Thus news articles must be compact and straight to the point. Unlike the text here, which I can fill with fluff, unrelated side remarks and repetition, a teletext author has to find the essence in the news and focus. That makes scanning Teletext news quick while giving a good view on what is "important" (by the standards of that broadcaster)
anthk
Yep. No bias, no matter which political side you choose, you just got raw news in any channel.
That was great for objectivity and fairness.
johannes1234321
I don't know how you read that into my post.
It is quite different: Having such a limited channel as Teletext one has to be even more selective on the news being reported and then which aspects of it to report.
Over here in Germany I got some TV stations discussing on celebrity news, some station focusing on economy/business news, others on political things, some in sports.
But yeah, USA has this "two sides" issue with a touch of zero sum (it's always either this or that side and either helping one or the other side)
mrguyorama
The constant belief by people that somehow, if you remove information, you reduce bias is insane.
I assure you, Pravda could fit it's biases, lies, propaganda, and omissions in 160 characters. Bullshit has always been easy to shrink.
It is nuance, context, framing, etc that you are eschewing in your mistaken belief of "no bias".
4ggr0
The actual infra-backend of the swiss Teletext is quite cute, just a single, Windows 2000 (if I remember correctly, maybe Server-edition) PC, running in a Datacenter-rack, on the floor of course, with about one dude who knows how it all works. Not sure how other countries do it, probably with similar, archaic setups.
At least that was the state about 10 years ago, maybe they upgraded the infra since then.
There's something about the short-form just-the-facts writing that makes information and news much easier to read than the puff pieces you find on many websites these days.
msephton
Love this. Many years ago I provided Teletext as a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget using content provided free of charge by a friendly Dutch guy who extracted it from the broadcast signal using some special hardware. Good times.
It seems like it would be a pretty neat little hobby project to develop a common teletext viewer / aggregator for all of these links people are putting up!
I bought my first Closed Captioning device in 1976. PBS stations in selected cities were using NTSC Line 21/22 for all their captioning and one-way tele-texbtbox needs (CC2/TEXT).
Also Sacramento NBC 3 started delivering closed-captioning in 1977.
FCC didn’t standardize until 1980.
I still have the decoder box.
dfawcus
In 1988 I worked for around a year for a company which used NAPLPS for various Data Broadcast advertising devices.
It actually had quite impressive graphics capabilities, although the vector graphics took some time to draw (using NEC V30 CPUs), and an additional graphics
processor chip (made my Intel if I recall).
Data Broadcast being a commercial use of the UK TV channel for various things, i.e. essentially a commercialization of the data channel over which Teletext was sent, Teletext had some of the flyback lines, DB had some others.
joezydeco
Meanwhile, in Chicago, station WFLD introduced a teletext service called Keyfax, built on Ceefax technology as a joint venture with Honeywell and telecom company Centel.
To try and solve the chicken-and-egg problem with the adoption of teletext decoders, Keyfax started in Chicago by broadcasting a static rotation of the data pages all through the overnight hours. It was kind of fascinating to watch back then.
Subtitles at page 888 too, where the subs could be overlaid on top of a movie instead of the full TTXT page.
randall
i used to work at KSL! we did some other crazy interactive tv early in the social media era… we actually won an emmy for creating a completely interactive tv show.
psim1
Can anyone recommend a good CSS replacement for viewing this site? The author posts interesting content but the site itself is unbearable.
Teletext had a better run in Europe for the same reason as public transport: higher population density. It is more economical when you can spread the cost over more customers. In places as sparsely populated as flyover US & Canada, the cost of maintaining a teletext presence wasn't worth the handful of contacts you'd get out of it. Boston or New York could have benefited, but for the rest of the country, it was brutally outperformed by the cork board.
memsom
Teletext is one way. Your receiver decodes the page you request, but you have no uplink.
Teletext was made by major broadcasters, so NBC/ABC/CBS in the US might have had a service. It is just broadcasted as part of the signal, so the actual hardware is in the end users device. All TV's in the UK and Europe just had teletext decoders built in as standard. The cost of entry was not high at all. The only expense was updating the content. But honestly, that wasn't really a massive effort unless you wanted a lot of graphics (ASCII style, obviously.) It was a bout as much effort as a local news paper or a well maintained BBS.
nothankyou777
You're looking at it through internet-era glasses. We're talking late 70s to early 80s tech and prices. Equipment was expensive. Clients were charged by the minute. Without city-level populations, the numbers didn't pan out. If the prospects were brighter, companies would have been more serious about converging on a standard.
A late 80s / early 90s BBS is no comparison. Cost-per-everything in computers had plummeted by then--even kids could host a BBS with the family computer.
Per wiki on Prestel (i know it's videotex, but the article covered both):
Hosting Costs:
> In 1985, British Telecom estimated that for an IP using a typical minicomputer (such as the PDP-11) located 100 km from London and handling up to 10 users simultaneously at peak times, the one-off software set-up cost would be at least £16,000, communication costs would range from £4,280 to £5,550 a year (depending on the type of connection), and Prestel usage would cost £8,600 a year.[82]: 4
Usage Costs:
> At the launch of the commercial service in September 1979, and in addition to phone charges, users were charged 3p per minute online to Prestel from 8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday, and 3p for three minutes at other times. Installing a phone jack-socket cost £13, with a quarterly rental of 50p. Business users paid an additional standing charge (i.e., a flat charge regardless of usage) of £12 per quarter.[23]
> By October 1982, the online usage charge had risen to 5p per minute (8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday and also 8 am to 1 pm on Saturdays, free at other times), the business standing charge to £15 per quarter, residential users now paid £5 per quarter, and jack installation cost "from £15", with a 15p quarterly rental fee.[24]: 2
Content Distribution Costs:
> A main IP rented pages from the Post Office (initially) or British Telecom (later), and controlled a three-digit master-page in the database. In 1982, this cost an annual £5,500 for a basic package,[24]: 1 equivalent to around £29,000 in 2021.[80]
ssh teletekst.nl
https://www.teletext.ch/
https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/teletext/id308630240?l=en-GB
In my view Teletext has a great property: A single page is short. Thus news articles must be compact and straight to the point. Unlike the text here, which I can fill with fluff, unrelated side remarks and repetition, a teletext author has to find the essence in the news and focus. That makes scanning Teletext news quick while giving a good view on what is "important" (by the standards of that broadcaster)
It is quite different: Having such a limited channel as Teletext one has to be even more selective on the news being reported and then which aspects of it to report.
Over here in Germany I got some TV stations discussing on celebrity news, some station focusing on economy/business news, others on political things, some in sports.
But yeah, USA has this "two sides" issue with a touch of zero sum (it's always either this or that side and either helping one or the other side)
I assure you, Pravda could fit it's biases, lies, propaganda, and omissions in 160 characters. Bullshit has always been easy to shrink.
It is nuance, context, framing, etc that you are eschewing in your mistaken belief of "no bias".
At least that was the state about 10 years ago, maybe they upgraded the infra since then.
The website (https://nos.nl/teletekst/101) and app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eoffice.an...) are very popular (no ads on either), but so is the website which covers a fraction of a modern browser's screen.
There's something about the short-form just-the-facts writing that makes information and news much easier to read than the puff pieces you find on many websites these days.
https://nmsceefax.co.uk
I feel like Homer Simpson, learning about Deng Xiaoping's death from a Powersauce bar.
It seems like it would be a pretty neat little hobby project to develop a common teletext viewer / aggregator for all of these links people are putting up!
By the way, an interesting book called "La TV da sfogliare. 1984-2024. 40 anni di Televideo" by Guido Barlozzetti came out this year.
It's super interesting (if you speak Italian and) if you're curious about the history of the Italian teletext.
https://rtve.es/television/teletexto
Private channels have teletext pages too.
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
Also Sacramento NBC 3 started delivering closed-captioning in 1977.
FCC didn’t standardize until 1980.
I still have the decoder box.
It actually had quite impressive graphics capabilities, although the vector graphics took some time to draw (using NEC V30 CPUs), and an additional graphics processor chip (made my Intel if I recall).
Data Broadcast being a commercial use of the UK TV channel for various things, i.e. essentially a commercialization of the data channel over which Teletext was sent, Teletext had some of the flyback lines, DB had some others.
To try and solve the chicken-and-egg problem with the adoption of teletext decoders, Keyfax started in Chicago by broadcasting a static rotation of the data pages all through the overnight hours. It was kind of fascinating to watch back then.
https://youtu.be/Bgs0kbxo68w
Subtitles at page 888 too, where the subs could be overlaid on top of a movie instead of the full TTXT page.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
https://vintagecomputer.ca/agvision-videotex-terminal/
Teletext was made by major broadcasters, so NBC/ABC/CBS in the US might have had a service. It is just broadcasted as part of the signal, so the actual hardware is in the end users device. All TV's in the UK and Europe just had teletext decoders built in as standard. The cost of entry was not high at all. The only expense was updating the content. But honestly, that wasn't really a massive effort unless you wanted a lot of graphics (ASCII style, obviously.) It was a bout as much effort as a local news paper or a well maintained BBS.
A late 80s / early 90s BBS is no comparison. Cost-per-everything in computers had plummeted by then--even kids could host a BBS with the family computer.
Per wiki on Prestel (i know it's videotex, but the article covered both):
Hosting Costs:
> In 1985, British Telecom estimated that for an IP using a typical minicomputer (such as the PDP-11) located 100 km from London and handling up to 10 users simultaneously at peak times, the one-off software set-up cost would be at least £16,000, communication costs would range from £4,280 to £5,550 a year (depending on the type of connection), and Prestel usage would cost £8,600 a year.[82]: 4
Usage Costs:
> At the launch of the commercial service in September 1979, and in addition to phone charges, users were charged 3p per minute online to Prestel from 8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday, and 3p for three minutes at other times. Installing a phone jack-socket cost £13, with a quarterly rental of 50p. Business users paid an additional standing charge (i.e., a flat charge regardless of usage) of £12 per quarter.[23]
> By October 1982, the online usage charge had risen to 5p per minute (8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday and also 8 am to 1 pm on Saturdays, free at other times), the business standing charge to £15 per quarter, residential users now paid £5 per quarter, and jack installation cost "from £15", with a 15p quarterly rental fee.[24]: 2
Content Distribution Costs:
> A main IP rented pages from the Post Office (initially) or British Telecom (later), and controlled a three-digit master-page in the database. In 1982, this cost an annual £5,500 for a basic package,[24]: 1 equivalent to around £29,000 in 2021.[80]