The Rise and Fall of Teletext
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2021
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While teletext never existed in some countries and has been outdated in others years ago, it is still popular in many places today and it is a fascinating example of a technology that, despite groundbreaking changes in other areas of media consumption, has remained this unchanged zombie from a different time. This is the story of teletext, covering how the BBC started developing Ceefax, how Teletext technology works and how the switch-over from analog to digital has disrupted this technology.
Keywords: Ceefax, Teletext, BBC, Tech, Retro, Technology, Television, Analog, VHS, Digital, British, United Kingdom, TV, Pixel, Videotext
Select video clips courtesy of Getty Images 
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Here in Finland alot of men over 60 check sport results from teletext. Also before about 2005 it was the easiest way to check tv schedule for the day.
I'm in my 20s and I remember this is how I checked the football scores as a kid, before smartphones and fast internet etc.
Suomi perkele!
Yeah as a kid I would always go onto teletext to see what movies would be playing on the children's channels on a Saturday morning
Almost everyone over 30 who watch sports knows the legendary 235
Teletext is still one of the most used ways to check news in southern Italy. Also, it's the only way subtitles are broadcasted on the main channels.
Did you know, if you recorded something off the tv back in the day, you also recorded the teletext of the time too. If you recorded it on a S-VHS tape, you should be able to press the teletext button while the tape is playing back, and it'll show the teletext from the time
you can also see it if you had a system to record the full broadcast on a dvd or other system that did not take in count to alter the video with. you would be able to see a squished version of it above the main video plus extra symbols and images placed just for the tv station to see.
Oh it's much better than that.
We wrote software to reconstitute the Teletext data from _any_ video recording, _including VHS_
O.K. now THIS is amazing. Talk about extra value from old random recordings. I definitely would have been into Teletext if I had not lived in the tragic Teletext void of the Midwest United States
Some computer DVR softwares (DVBViewer atleast) can capture teletext to transport stream. Also transport streams were used in Finnish Audiovisual Archive and can view Teletext that way from 2009+
@@MostlyPennyCat Source please! This sounds amazing!
Oh, my dad was OBSESSED with this thing. He bought a new TV and there was no teletext support, so he went, returned it, and now he can check the weather and read headlines in peace again… he’s German, where it’s still very popular!
It was pretty useful before "the internets".
Some people still use it even here in Czechia, especially when computer is occupied and phone is too far from TV couch. Some people use it for fast check of some sport results or weather, but it's dying, most of people don't even remember that such thing exists.
TELETEX Rocks (I can't imagine TV without it) even today) 🤣 TV isn't complete without TELETEXT 😁
@@LMB222 It still is. Teletext doesn't have ads or annoying paywalls. No data-mining as their is no return channel telling your provider which page you're watching.
It's just one way broadcasted plain text, and that's just what many people want.
I love the internet and already use it for decades but not because I like the slick ad riddled news websites. And for that there is something peaceful about teletext.
There are still a lot of people that go to the teletext website or use the teletext app to watch the news just as a way to not be bothered by ads.
@@robinheijblom2929just thing about how many heart attacks pfizer rolled out instead of teletext
Thanks to Technology Connections for sending me here! Teletext was a massive part of my childhood in 1990s UK! C4 even had a quiz on their Teletext called Bamboozled. Sometimes they switched it to a choose your adventure type game. Nostalgia is a sweet treat!
It's still highly used in Germany apparently
I don't even have the tv cable connected 😂😂😂
Don't ask why
Probably coz of the garbage Internet speed or the old ppl
I loved bamboozled 😁
I am also here from Technology Connections. Teletext in Australia was on its way out by the time I had a TV capable of accessing it.
We used to play Bamboozled in Curry's on break. My dad and I went to Egypt on a cheaper-than-we-could-believe cruise, after my dad found it on ITV's Teletext.
We could only play Bamboozled at my Grans as we did not have a fastext TV at the time
As a deaf person, my fond memory of Ceefax and teletext is how useful subtitle (closed captioning) was. The number to enable it was 888. I also remember a game on channel 4 teletext called bamboozle. :D
Loved that game :)
888 here too (not deaf, just liked having subtitles as a kid)
Yes bamboozle was awesome!
Bamboozle and pen pals.
In Germany subtitles are on 333. My grandparents Loewe TV had a dedicated subtitle-button. I had no idea how it works and was amazed as a kid. :-)
As an American, I feel nostalgic for something I never knew existed haha. I just asked my French wife about it and she was surprised I didn't know what is was... Now I feel less tech savvy
Have you lived in the teletext era?
@@engineeredarmy1152 yep, in its heyday it seems
Teletext was a thing in North America, but it never took off thanks to the high costs of Teletext decoders and the lack of a single Teletext standard.
How to get French wife?
@@Agua-hd4jh Go to France?
One of my favourite memories of Teletext was MTV UK's Text pages, where the programme listing and weekly charts were listed on pages 100-199, then when you got to pages 200 onwards, they clearly let some interns go a little crazy; the pages were filled with paragraphs of random information, inspirational quotes from famous musicians and political figures, and bizarre text-based artwork like recreating famous album covers using numbers and letters. Those pages got updated every couple of weeks with new artwork and different quotes.
Being born deaf in the 1960s, I bought my first teletext-enabled TV in 1988 purely for the subtitles (closed captions) and that was a real life changer for me. Also as a weather enthusiast I liked the weather pages which included global daily reports (max and min temperatures). While teletext is long since dead (and I do miss it) at least the subtitle part is still going strong in this digital age but I don't bother with the "red button" part on account of the internet.
Nathan Dane is a young guy from Northern Ireland who's made a Ceefax replica. It takes BBC website RSS feeds and presents them in the same way Ceefax did. I thought it'd be a novelty, but I've got it on my bookmarks bar to read news and sport headlines. I don't know what the weather pages are like but it might be a thing you would be interested in
Hello@@dannymcwilliams422, I've actually got that on my bookmarks as well and indeed works exactly as it says on the tin. Great for nostalgia value and yet still does the job well. No adverts and clutter, simple stuff and to the point.
In the video I noticed that the USA would use a different form of CC.
So now I'm wondering. In the Netherlands you have to tune in on an channel. Then TXT. Then PAGE 888 and CC would appear in the screen.
Was that the same in uk?
@@ramacharya7843 here at the UK with analogue signal, it was a case of tuning into channels and then pressing 888 to get the subtitles. Similar with today's digital Freeview TV (BBC, ITV, etc) but all TV remotes now their own "SUB" button to simply turn subtitles on and off.
How wonderful, it seems to have really been a building block in your persona and life. I miss nostalgic things like this, with all our modernity things seem to have gotten duller, more vapid and less reliable
I remember my Grandad scoring a 7 day holiday in Lanzarote for absolute pennies on the Teletext, way back when I was a wee lad. He'd found a page that showed last minute cancellations and stalked it for weeks for a bargain holiday.
now that's pretty savvy, I like it!
Nifty I would say!
Plus one for Teletext holidays! Got a nice week in Turkey, for a bargain price, in about 1999. Still weird to think of using it, now we’ve got the ol’ internet. 😀
We did exactly the same,always booked bargain holidays with teletext in the late 90s,it was great at the time!
Me and my mum went to Spain for £150 in 1996. Likewise she and my dad would have it on all day and night looking for deals. It was one of those hotel allocated on arrival trips and it turned out pretty good!
my mother used teletext right up until the digital switchover
my brother still uses it
I miss teletext.
So did I. I am rather partial to ‘The Red Button’ even now.
We still use it here, even with digital TV.
It's still available, and T888 is just charming.
In the US, you would enable Teletext in the 90s if you wanted to scare someone less technologically-inclined into thinking that their TV was broken. When you turned it on, the only thing it would do is cover half the screen with a black box (or the entire screen, depending on the TV). I always wondered what it was *actually* for and didn't find out until this video. American TVs had the button to enable Teletext (usually shared space with the caption button) but no broadcaster actually utilized it.
Here in Germany most TV stations still have the old blocky Teletext.
Great Video!
I'm Mexican and I had no idea this existed. It is really amazing and I love the way it looks. I'm glad to know there are places where Teletext still exists, and that there are people working on keeping it alive. I've always loved the look of old graphics and the futuristic aesthetic from the 70's and 80's.
X2 solo que soy Colombiano
An interesting fact about Teletext: sometimes, Teletext was banned / removed from TVs in prisons, as it made it very easy to transmit messages to convicts illegally. Those messages could be, for instance, orders to harass other inmates or communications over ongoing crimes...
Interesting.... how would that work though? Wouldn't you have to tune into a specific channel to get Teletext which a regular person might not have?
@@Lightning2011 Apparently it's still used for that purpose to this day (I just read an article about it recently). People on the outside send coded messages to dating chats on teletext, that the prisoners then decode.
@@Lightning2011 I assume they used interactive services where users could send messages through SMS.
@@okaro6595 interesting... thanks!
It let you do things long ago that computers couldn’t really do till much later, such as a connected chat message service..
I am 52 from the UK and remember Teletext coming in and it really is so easy to forget how ground breaking it was at the time. Thanks for this blast from the past, I thoroughly enjoyed it
Did u get football match stats on teletext back then?
I am one of those strange males who has no interest in football. That said I am fairly sure they would do summaries of big matches along with the results sometimes. As for actual stats I couldn't say other than ofc the league tables were always shown.
@@engineeredarmy1152 Yes. Any kind of news and info.
Me too. I will only watch England in a major international tournament. No interest at all in local teams.
@@engineeredarmy1152 Depends on what you mean by stats.
In those far-away days there was no detailed stats like today.
You couldn't get details of how many yards a player ran or things like that.
Technology simply didn't exist.
And, TBH, we weren't really interested.
The results and report was plenty.
Well that brings back some memories - I worked at Ceefax in the 80's so you included footage of some of my colleagues, including my boss David Wilson (he was the BBC's Science Correspondent during the Apollo landings). You didn't mention Full Level One Features (FLOF) which introduced the coloured buttons on remote controls and the matching labels at the bottom of the screen. These allowed you to quickly jump to those pages, which would be stored ready for you. Early teletext systems didn't store the whole set of pages because they didn't have the memory. Even the Advanced Teletext System on the BBC Micro could only store live copies of about twenty pages (I should know I wrote the software). One great feature of teletext was that its display was designed to be seen on a TV - hence 40 characters by 24 lines (25 with FLOF) with special character generators to round out the pixels of the characters to make them smoother. Remember that the display was interlaced so you had to be careful with horizontal lines to stop them strobing at 25Hz. I suppose it was a child of its time, but I still miss it...
A full page of Teletext takes 1KByte so 20 pages in a BBC Micro sounds correct. The problem with Fastext was that when you pressed the coloured button it usually brought up the second page of a three page sequence so you still had to wait for the first page to come around. In the Noughties I had a PC TV card like a Hauppauge that would cache every single page it received in the PCs memory so after several minutes you had instant access to every single page.
It was massive in the UK. I remember my Grandad and Dad using it a lot. In the UK you could use it to check all sorts even flight arrivals and departures. Almost like the internet.
Games, weather, travel agents, and news, too.
A real 'no frills' information experience. Nothing flashy or distracting, and definitely light or absent advertising, unless you're specifically looking for it.
Booked it, packed it, f.....off
I didn’t own a television set within the last 15 years. However I still use teletext for reading the news. At least German public broadcasters maintain their teletext and make it accessible trough the internet. These teletext news websites are superior to modern news websites as they have no useless images. The announcements are also kept short and concise. Sometimes technical limitations make product better. The only downside though is that permalinks are impossible: If the accoutrement is gone, its gone forever
This is the most idiotic comment of the month
@@ChefMarius it actually makes sense to me. Internet has a free model, which kind of forces into bad journalism with click baits and other bad practices. This doesnt need to exist on Teletext.
@@mickaelgodard I think dalton5000's comment was self referential.
@@fiddley Yeah, I think I have to agree... It's the only thing that makes sense...
@@ChefMarius You must be the autority on idiotic comments then. giving away awards like that. You shouldn't attack people like that.
fwiw: I used teletext as an app on my phone for a long time as well, for the exact same reason.
Teletext is still used in Sweden. My grandmother, 83, still uses it at times.
Yes true. Everybody I know who are above the age of 60 use it.
Under 40years Young and use it everyday 😊
Yes on svt
same in Norway , NRK stil have its TextTV as we call it
@@mareli82
Yes Texttv in Sweden also
Technology Connections raid party checking in.
Little known fact - (and if anyone still has a VHS player you can try this) if you play a video that was recorded from a TV broadcast i.e. homemade VHS tape, then press the Teletext/ceefax button on your remote you will see the Teletext for that day and time the video was recorded. Not only that but you can also navigate Teletext for that date using the three numbers on your controller! The information is patchy but it does work.
I have a 1988 Christmas recording from BBC2 showing the end of the queen's speech followed by back to the future. I can get the Teletext for that day and the news from it. It's pretty cool.
I used to play “Bamboozle” on channel 4’s teletext back when I was a kid in the 90s ❤️
Whenever i ear about teletext, my first thought is always bamboozle.
YES
Digitiser has its own RUclips channel with Mr Biffo himself
With our quizmaster Bamber Boozle 🙂
That’s a bit of a Reveal!
I'm Italian and I've lately been wondering why teletext (or Televideo, as we call it) still exists. This has been a really great explanation. In Italy, not only it is constantly updated, but it also has a regional version for each of the 20 regions, with dedicated graphics and pages for each one. I find it really fascinating that there are people that can still say they work on teletext
Weird, here in the UK we wrote the replacement standard, MHEG.
London 2012 was amazing, you could choose from the text service to watch any of the sports, which would then get shown on the TV via an IP stream.
It was amazing.
And has since been discontinued.
Hi, I'm Swiss-Italian and I still work for Swiss Teletext (the Italian language version so it's RSI Teletext). It's a little bit weird to work on a technology everybody consider dead 😁
Televideo cultura italiana ✊
They are happy to offer teletext though digital or proper digital teletext in other countries in Europe but not in the UK. Well, apart from the former freeview interactive holiday channel that is.
I was thinking couldn't the BBC offer digital Ceefax alike to the forrmer freeview interactive holidaty channel did instead of the current BBCi.
@@MostlyPennyCat Back in 2012 very few TVs had an internet connection. The Panasonic I bought back then didn't. Without it MHEG was slow and difficult to navigate. The thing that I found the worst was the inability to get the text full screen. I double checked this morning and there is still a distracting live video stream completely unrelated to what you are reading about taking up half the screen. To me MHEG was a big step backwards from the Analogue Teletext of the 1990s which I used as much then as I use the internet today.
Hi from Technology Connections! Anyone else from there?
Yep :)
I work in electronics retail in Finland and still every so often get customers who ask "how the hell do i get teletext to show up on my new tv?!"
Our tv and radio laws require subtitles to be available for finnish and swedish programmes and a lot of them are provided through teletext, which i'm guessing is one of the biggest reasons we still havent gotten rid of it.
I'm German and didn't know that Teletext is not a thing in other countries anymore, thought everyone in the world still uses it
Dutch here and it still works here I check it although on the internet for weather and soccer results TV i dont use anymore
Same thought
here in austria it is used by my mother everyday to check whats coming up next
Teletext in the UK ended in October 2012.
Danish here, and same, it just seemed like such an standard thing. But I also know the government here wants to phase out Teletext (Or Tekst TV as its called here) in 2023 due to fewer people using it these days... My mom still uses it near daily though so there's that.
I'm curious as how US viewers will react to this video. Teletext was a huge part of my childhood, especially in getting to know technology more. Thanks for this blast to the past.
As an American, I feel nostalgic for something I never knew existed haha
Yeah, I had heard of teletext but no experience of it whatsoever. I can imagine it occupying the same mindspace as nostalgia for dos gaming, which it looks like, or the early internet, which it sorta functioned as poorly.
As an American it's cool to see technology we never had.
@@Tinil0 It's like revisiting Half Life or Doom, or thinking about an old forum/online game which doesn't exist anymore
Jealous lol
I was sent here from Technology Connections, thank you for this great documentary on something we never got here in the US in wide release sadly.
I'm my 40's and I used and still use teletext alot! Here in the Netherlands we also had pages with quizzes where you could use the '?' key on the remote to display the answer. Nowadays my current TV provider doesn't offer the teletext service anymore. Luckily the National Broadcasting Service here still has an dedicated app for mobile devices to use teletext so I still use that one!
there's an app for NOS teletekst?
Teletext was like having google for your tv when I was a teen. It was pretty useful actually and we used it a lot for sports and tv schedules.
In Croatia we switched to digital at the end of 2010, and we still have teletext on almost all channels.. Amazing stuff!
Same in Sweden!
Same in Portugal! ;)
And the UK. We had a 4 year switch over region by region between 2008 to 2012.
@@carlybishop6160 same in italy, after analog shutdown in 2012 no teletext died on digital
Same here in Serbia
Fun fact: UK Teletext wasn't limited to decimal numbers.
Hexadecimal values were valid from 100 to 8FF.
While there were no remote buttons for A-F, the pages were accessible using FastText buttons if the person coding the Teletext pages chose to do so. The game Bamboozle on Channel 4 made use of some of this extra addressing capability.
Like function keys on computer keyboards.
I've never seen a keyboard with more than 12 function keys but computer should support up to F24
@@qdaniele97 IBM made terminal keyboards with F13-24 though. They weren't standard equipment with most PCs, but they _did_ exist. Unicomp still makes a version of these too, as the "PC 122".
I loved Bamboozle. I used to play it regularly!
You could use this to hack the Bamboozle game if you had a slower Teletext TV, if you pressed the right answer the loading page would display at the top left and if the number was in a sequence you knew you had the right answer.
Played bamboozle every day on ch4 i believe 😂
I wish Teletext was still properly around, not just even in today’s world, but *especially* in today’s world. Its limitations means you‘ll get exactly what you came for.
There weren’t any articles like “Here’s 7 things you need to know about the recent death of Princess Diana and why that matters”, and the ads were not obnoxious things that slowed down the page nor made browsing difficult.
I might actually buy that Teefax Raspberry Pi.
Strange that you should mention Princess Diana, because that is my strongest memory of getting news from Teletext. My Girlfriend was staying over and in the morning I went downstairs to get us coffees Out of habit I switched on the TV and pressed text. That morning the top headline on the Page 100 homepage was "Princess Diana dies in Paris Car Crash". Instead of doing what we had planned we spent most of the morning watching Prime Minister Tony Blair give his "People's Princess" speech and all the other news coverage.
For me, Teletext was mostly that button on the remote that I sometimes accidentally pressed. Then I wouldn't know what button I pressed and couldn't get rid of the Teletext covering the cartoon I was trying to watch. There would be buttons that shifted it to half the screen or made the Teletext transparent, but getting rid of it was always an issue. My parents never used it so I guess I never learned what its use really was and by the time I did find out, the internet had already mostly replaced it.
same, i remember on samsung tv pressing exit like on other menus wouldn't close it but show the number on the top left and in some cases subtitles, you had to exit by pressing the teletext botton 3-4 times
i have the same story as u, almost identical
I am still doing this in The Netherlands.
Nice video! I liked the the old-style 4:3 aspect ratio.
The big advantage of Teletext is that it’s just condensed, concise information. No images or illustrations, no obnoxious ads (only text ads, if any), no “reports” about celebrities, no distractions, just the most important pieces of news and that’s it. What’s not to like? Glad it still exists where I live.
That was more like a square instead of 4:3 I think.
@@fen0221 The video is encoded in 960x720. Which is 4:3.
Important according to the person who curates the news. If that person has an agenda they can pick and choose only that news which supports that agenda and ignore the rest.
Came here from Technology Connections, good stuff you have earned my sub sir!
Japan has something similar, the “d” button on the TV remote. But it evolved from teletext, being able to display fancy graphics and all way beyond the low resolution seen here. Still going strong today and even made it into digital broadcasts.
Holy moley I just checked my remote and never noticed the D button. This is awesome!
to be fair you already had the internet in some limited form in 80s hahaha I've seen people doing bids and banking via famicom modem on some old anime. In mid 80s we did not even have the color tv in Europe, I mean ok the tech was out there bur 90% of people still only had black and white TVs with color TVs only being used by some state institudions, schools and such. My father said he has seen a color TV for the first time in 1990 at some office.
Here in the Netherlands Teletext is still alive on the public broadcaster channels. The Dutch BBC (NOS) also made an app, and it is actually relatively popular, having over a million downloads on Android alone (on a population of 17 million).
NOS Teletext, wat een nostalgie! Gebruik de app dagelijks.
When I was a kid, in 80s and early 90s, this was mindblowing. You could check out news, current weather forecast, sporting results (with live match monitoring, as a Formula 1 fan it was really nice to have lap times etc. on hand anytime you wanted instead of waiting them show them), lottery results, program schedules etc. anytime you wanted. Back then Internet wasn't yet available to general public and even it came available it was first available only via dial up modems, you couldn't really use it anytime you wanted and as much you wanted as it was rather expensive make a dial up calls to use it, while teletext was completely free and didn't even need a computer as it was built in television. Also one crazy thing: VCR also recorded teletext, though there was recording errors depending on quality of tape, but it was possible to pop in old VHS tape and read teletext from the past.
I recall that my first Dial Up internet service back in the mid 1990s came with something like 8 hours a month usage. Anything above that cost extra. Once when I used it for about 20 hours in the month I ended up with a hefty bill. There was also the inconvenience (complaints from my Mother) of no phone calls when you were on the internet.
'Free' depending on the country you lived in... *cough* TV Licence. *cough*
as an American who has literally never heard of this before, this is fascinating
Didn’t you have closed captions in America which used a similar method?
I fondly remember using teletex in the 80s and 90s as a child. It had the same look as many of the early computer programs that we'd use in school. I was always intrigued by it, it felt like exploring an empty museum alone. You'd input the page number on the remote, and then wait.... sometimes the numbers seemed to cycle quickly and the result displayed, other times you felt as thought the page would never load. It was difficult to grasp as a child how vast the system was, coupled with the speed and access to the TV, those boundaries were never realised. I always loved discovering games or pages of art. It was just like the thrill of getting new software for the computer when I was a child....... as I type this I now realised I've become ancient... back when I was young.... haha!
Many memories of using Teletext in the UK: Digitiser, Bamboozle, learning about the death of Princess Diana (okay, that was a one-off). Also, I remember Channel 4 broadcasting Teletext content nightly as video until 6am when cartoons started.
I learnt about Diana through a similar means, PBS broke in with text. I'm in Canada, and PBS is American, but I was plopped in front of the TV to watch kids shows at my aunt's house as my mother babysat her many pets, and PBS was one of the few stations that came in clearly. (My aunt mostly relied on VCR but it was broken, iirc, until her now-husband got a new one in 1999.) It then broke in a few moments later with a news reading, but I'll never forget how it just cut out of the cartoon and into a big blocky screen.
Fun fact! In Poland it is still being used by prisoners. You can find those paid sms pages where they talk with loved ones, share how their day was and how much they miss each other. TV is in every prison, and smuggled phones are pretty common so its easy and quick way to contact each other without surveillance
I had so much fun going through teletext pages as a kid, thanks for bringing back the memories!
Ahhh teletext... This was basically the "internet" of my childhood
In Sweden, Teletext was really big in the 90's and early 2000s and til this day the old people wants it on their TV, but its slowly starting to get removed on all modern TV's. I remember using teletext alot as a kid to see what programs the specific channel would air that day, or to read some news! Good stuff
I have never heard of this technology before. Fascinating
Haha that's amazing. I remember playing a lot at my grandma's house. Her TV was newer than ours so it always felt cutting edge. By the time we had a Teletext-compatible TV at home, we also had Internet so it wasn't that interesting to me any more
American, of course.
In Europe Teletext was like the internet before the internet took off. Pages and pages of cool stuff sent through the airwaves with your TV signal.
Americans got jipped on this one. 😥
It's sooo common here in Germany
Tech Connections sent me
Yup - same. We did have teletext over analog satellite over her in South Africa in the 90s.
@@Rouxenator Really, did we?
Was it controlled by SABC?
@@SJPretorius000 yes, later when they launched the digital Vivid satelite service with Sentech it was still present.
I remember during the boring show hours of TV, a teletext page with jokes was my only form of entertainment at my grandfather's remote house on a rainy day.
When I was a kid in the 80's, I dreamed of Teletext one day being used for games.
It was sometimes used for games, even interactive ones.
I don't understand the RUclips algorithm and how this video is lacking in views. The production quality and interesting content should make it a 1+ million viewed vid... you should get a Patreon so at least you could get some more support for these solid vids
He he maybe they don't want people ditching the internet for teletext
I've never seen this youtube channel before so algorithm clearly works. Liked and subbed!
Another interesting use of teletext in Norway was to actually censor adult films on cable TV. For satelite viewers the trick was to switch the subtitle language from Norwegian, to remove the teletext censor bar.
That feels deliberate if they didn't bother just censoring the video feed haha
@@occono3543 If you were watching via cable then the trick would not work since the censor bars was already activated in the feed from the cable provider.
I literally browsed the Teletext before we had internet. I was looking at news, reading little stories, reading jokes and riddles. There were even little games you could play. There were even chats or something like forum entries before everyone had internet. It still exists but it's not as relevant anymore as it was in the 90s.
I recently turned 30 and I remember using this a lot back in the early 2000's here in Romania... Nostalgia kicking in
15:58; notice the Wendover and Polymatter recommendations-- a man of taste!
there is also real science
Teletext was a massive part of my childhood, thank you for doing this video
technology connections send me here
German TV stations in my childhood had hundreds of teletext pages. I used to find subtitles there for example so I could watch TV at night without waking my parents :D
Teletext was a thing in the US in the late 80s. We had a Zenith System 3 TV that could pick it up. The Turner TBS network broadcast it and it was called Electra. It had news and sports scores and stock quotes etc. I think Zenith was the only TV manufacturer that ever supported it, so it never really went anywhere.
It went nowhere because broadcasters wouldn't adopt it -- or settle on a standard -- thus TV manufactures wouldn't adopt it. There was also the complication that cable TV operators wouldn't carry it. A company I worked for back in the day tried it -- guide data, news, etc. -- but it didn't work at all on cable; they abandoned it because of that. (oddly, we have the very same in-band guide data in broadcast TV today.)
I think the main point is that in Europe actually regulators mandating subtitles for hearing impaired set on the existing technology (Teletext) instead of Closed Captions.
The argument for Close Captions by the time was AFAIK that a normal VHS recording would preserve them even in Extended Long Play as the needed data bandwidth is way lower than even the worst video bandwidth on such tapes.
So you could actually record a presentation on a cheap VHS tape and show it over and over again with CC enabled on an airport for example.
Teletext was awesome! The original graphics were sufficient for the purpose of conveying information without detracting from the subject. I believe that this "no nonsense" approach to sending information is what's appealing to this very day. Somehow, it relates to reading a book, or the important news that you really want to find out, thus, anything else than the message and a diagram are superfluous. Remember, that mobile SMS is still popular (and I prefer it whenever possible and sufficient) despite many other messaging systems offering vastly superior possibilities.
Teletext was especially useful here in Northern Ireland. If the TV broadcasts where delayed / scrambled due to bombing attacks etc broadcasts of the local TV, the teletext and ceefax usually was still broadcast.
10:26 that's not Bulgaria, it's Croatian teletext. I still remember how fascinated I was by all the colors and graphics back when I was a kid. Many TVs here still use teletext to this day
Between 1995 and 99 it was my primary source of information about all the things I wanted to know at the time, f.e. sport results, tv schedule, current news etc
We used Teletext just before it was booted off of the BBC. R.I.P Teletext. You were bloody brilliant in the mid-2000s.
Anyone here from technology connections?
I'm from sweden and read teletext new everyday. Very good way to get short and condensed news not filled with opinions.
This was big in Iceland. I'm in my mid 30's, I used this A LOT as a teenager. Mainly on football scores, news... and stock prices. In the early 00's there was a chat feature. Mainly used by drunk and desperately single people.
I remember playing interactive games on Teletext on Channel 4 UK. It required the 4 colour coded buttons on the remote to navigate through the game, displaying numbers like 16A, 17E, etc. that could not be directly entered by the digit keys due to the hex letters. I also remember interactive phone based services like bus/train timetables, particularly here in Ireland on RTÉ,. One would dial a phone #, key in announced page #, then use phone's touch tone keys to navigate. The page loads were near instant as dialling a digit would result in the requested page being broadcast.
I remember trying interactive teletext with voice recognition. Every user was given their own "timed page" time so 1440 people could have their own unique version of the same page number.
Totally forgot this existed until your video. Incredible job
I used to use Teletext during the nineties in Northern Queensland Australia - mainly for the lightning grid screen. The transition from Teletext to using local BBS's was a logical step forward.
7:30 Sending messages on Teletext is still very popular in Poland among inmates. Since they can't have phones or computers their families and friends can communicate with them using those messages.
What an amazing video on the subject! Well done!
I loved teletext when I was a kid. When I found the button on the new TV's remote for that I was pretty impressed that existed. It could even make the black parts transparent overlaying the text on top of the current broadcast. Football results, standings and news, Formula 1 and even just going through all the channels and checking if they have teletext or not and explore the pages one by one. Even gotten some homepage images for my phone at the time via SMS. It was my early Internet so to speak. My family was poor so didn't have a computer until I was in high-school. After watching the video I now know why it kept looping the page numbers to go to another. Glad it's still alive!
Wonderfully edited and well-researched! And in the proper aspect ratio to boot. ;-)
My favourite thing is the text-art at 7:28, which I haven't seen before.
Hey Dan ;)
@@custardo Hey, a nice surprise to see you here! :-)
Kind of reminds me of the demo scene back in the commodore and like era.
In Italy it is still quite used. We even have two versions still up and running, one from RAI and one from Mediaset.
I'm saving up for one of these TV's! Can't wait!!
In Poland it also survived the digital transition and is still used to this day. Although mainly by old people or prison inmates. It used to be the Internet of 90s for many people here, as regular Internet was inaccessible in 90s here. Expensive and slow, it was mostly for business use only, not for home use. At the same time everyone had a TV with teletext.
I remember using teletext in the 90s to check when movies played at the cinema, or the lottery numbers for my grandma. It was the internet before the internet.
This video is so professional, really high standard even for you, Neo! Good job.
Very interesting time for YT to recommend this video as teletext turned 40 years yesterday (Oct 7th 2021) here in Finland. I haven't watched traditional TV in almost a decade, so my usage for teletext has been none existent in recent years (I do have TV tuner in my PC with teletext support), but back in my school days and no internet, it was a very important source of information. While I don't have much use for it, I'm glad it still exists.
Man, I love the look of teletext! It's just simple, colorful and unique. Growing up in Germany in the late '90s and early '00s, I watched a lot of KiKa (the kids' channel). They used to have a show where you could take part in a quiz via teletext, using the 4 color buttons on the remote. Fun times!
I’m from Malaysia and I didn’t know our public service broadcaster RTM had their own CeeFax. 7:00 was really surprising! Also I’m not surprised that RTM decided to advertise KFC above anything else.
Excellent video! I really loved it and I thought it was super well done
Wait, WHAT?!
7:05 Wasn't it pixelated enough already?
I remember TV channels in Germany often mentioning their teletext in advertisement and what you can look up there. But we had TV magazines back then in the 2000s to check the TV schedule, which are kind of their own nostalgia themselves.
I remember sometimes accidentally switching into teletext pressing the wrong button on the remote, and then switching the TV off and on again because I didn't know how to get out of it again.
Just an American here who never knew this existed. Thanks for sharing this amazing piece of history!
Ah Teletext, how we used to check on Cinema and tv timetables. Those were the days... of the early 00s in Ireland.
Ahhh the days of Ceefax and Oracle here in 80's UK, I actually miss those times :/
Damn... Teletext was so good and yet some never experienced its goodness. You could even make simple graphical adventures like I did for a school project some 30 years ago. I even loaded up a Teletext browser editor recently to have a mess about with it and yeah it was still painstakingly difficult to manually draw with, but is helped by modern editors, but it was a nice look back!
what a gorgeous video. love the style of this. the renders and the 4:3 aspect ratio are awesome.
Not only Germany, also in Romania, teletext is still used by the Romanian public TV TVR and the private tv channel Antena 1!
I remember using teletext in the 90's to see the tv-guide mostly. Haven't used it since the start of the 00's
A nice video. During the 1990s, before getting always on internet, I was addicted to Teletext.
I checked this morning and the BBC "Red Button" MHEG service is still operating but with just News Headlines, Sports Headlines and Weather. It was supposed to close in 2020, but Age UK pointed out that many elderly people were still relying on it for news, which was obviously very important during the Pandemic.
Something you might not know is that many people like my parents rented their TVs in the 1980s. A Government tax incentive meant that the rental companies could offer teletext sets for very little more than a standard set.
Perfect description of teletext mechanics and overall TV technology.
Until the mid 2000's it was actually quite a handy piece of technology. Used it a lot. Airport arrival times were very handy. Haven't used it in more then a decade though. Don't even own a television for about the same time.
Great video that.
Thanks for sending me on that nostalgia trip.
I remember in the UK, sitting on the floor, watching the football scores coming through on Teletext as a young lad. I still remember the footballs main screen number... 302. When the football had finished I'd go over and do the Bamboozle quiz.
Awesome bit of technology.
Bamboozle ! Good times.
Great and informative video, your animations are amazing.
The fact that this video was made and uploaded in 4:3 really tops it off. Very well done
I always enjoyed the smooth jazz that would get played on uk teletext during the late nights and early mornings
Fun fact: in Sweden despite the switch over to digital they managed to make a digital version of teletext so it still exsists (fun fact on the channels called svt 1 and svt 2 on page 777 you can find a test screen for teletext it’s amazing it still exists)
There was a digital version in the UK with photos but they switched that off.
It didn't feel the same.
@@Gambit771 It is still there on the BBC Red button (I checked this morning) but it is a shadow of its former self.
Nicely presented boss
Still remember the jazz music that would play in the early hours over teletext. 4/5 year old me would sometimes try and wake up and listen to it