Struggling...

Sorry for bad sentence structuring in my post. I was typing that on my phone ;).

Patrick

^ what he says. I'm from The Netherlands where it was used a lot. It was the first medium that you could get the information you wanted, when you wanted it. Even when the internet was beginning to be a thing, it stayed because every household could use it since it was available in every tv. News, weather forecast, sport results. It was all there and up to date. Wanted to check the weather for the coming hours? I went to page 703 and volia. Coming days? Just typed in 704 and I would know. It was what the internet is today. It was even easier than the internet because there was only one source for everything. No fragmentation of different weather stations telling different things, and above all: all settings where the same in every household. After a while the public channels got on board. But weren't nearly used as much. From what I remember, teletext in the Netherlands was just as unthinkable to not exist just as the internet is now, everybody used it.

Patrick

Why not just document your attempts at trying to grasp what teletext is... culturally as well as technically... I'd be interested in seeing that through your eyes. It needn't be a comprehensive video that explains every aspect of it in perfect detail.

Clemens

New Patron here, love your work. I see you have tons of feedback on this already, but I’ll add a little more... I grew up with teletext in the UK and used it most regularly for checking the TV listings for upcoming programming throughout my childhood. The key recollection I have is of the waiting... sometimes what seemed like endless waiting! But in an era before everything was available at a click, it didn’t seem so bad. You had to wait for the pages to come to you in a set order and, obviously, if you wanted page 3 of 4, it was always on page 4 of 4 when you turned teletext on, because, it just would be. It would only take a couple of minutes, but in today’s ‘right now’ world it seems crazy in retrospect... (it was still quicker than dial up probably though) Another use-case comes to mind where the waiting was much worse/longer. I have a clear recollection of using Teletext (Specifically Oracle on ITV, as it was commercial and carried advertisements unlike Ceefax on BBC) to find cheap flights to the US in around 1998/99, I recall the holiday pages on Oracle being over 50 page images long (page would change about once every 30 seconds so it would take 25 minutes or so to cycle through them all) I would just wait to see if any ‘cheap flight’ brokers came around listing the cities I wanted to fly to, if one came up, you could pause/hold the page to make a note of the details, then unpause to start the cycle again (but it would jump back in wherever the cycle was, so you may have missed a couple of pages). The first widescreen TV I bought (around 1999 also) made life slightly easier as it would cache the pages as they went through, so you could go back to any page that had already been shown in the cycle (you still had to wait for the whole page run to go through to get them all)

Paul Sharp

The weird thing, as a 10 year old, or whatever I was when my parents first bought a teletext enabled TV, I was slightly underwhelmed. It was really useful and the function where you could download programs for various computers seemed like it was from the future, particularly as there was no way at all where I could persuade my parents every to buy any sort of expansion to my Electron. They'd bought a computer, they weren't buying anything else. Other than that, it was really bloody slow. The mix button was a godsend because you could watch TV while it found the subpage you wanted but once you got there, if you forgot to hit the hold button, it would roll round. If you hit it, and then hit it again, it'd show some random page. Fastext fixed that but that was later There were lots of bits that came later and becomes a part of your childhood. Playing Bambozzle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOJcq-kBjB0) using the reveal button. The quiz master was called "Bamba Bozzle". A reference to Bamber Gascoigne, who cult 80s sitcom The Young Ones make a joke about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysG96dUtGh4. Or ITV Teletext has a Holidays page where companies would advertise cheap holidays. "Benidorm. 14 nights. 2 People. Leaving on Wednesday. £250". With a phone number. My parents would phone up the number and take all of my mother's skills of never paying for anything if she could get away with it to get one of the, likely, five holidays even close to the advertised price

Mark Stradling

In the Netherlands Teletekst is largely used to convey news, sports results, lottery numbers and the weather and such like. And closed captioning is also done through a Teletekst page (888) But in the heydays of Teletekst (when the Internet wasn't as big as it is today), there were games to be played on it (mostly just simple word riddles and such) and there was Teletekst chat. A chatter could use the service by smsing to a certain (expensive) number and the message would appear on the screen after a few minutes, with a username that the chatter had connected to his or her mobile phone number, when they first set up their chat account. There even used to be Teletekst dating pages, and of course advertisements for all sorts of services (even erotic ones).

Marcel de Jong

dang there's a lot of big comments here. My scrolling muscles are tired Anyways No worries good sir! Keep on with what feels right and is fun for you, no matter what! Looking forward to what comes up next, even if it ain't teletext

Justin Romprey

Hm. My previous comment seems to have disappeared, so this doesn't make much sense as an addendum... In case the previous comment vapourised somehow: --------------------------------------------------- Hi, just subbed having heard you're doing a teletext episode. Yay teletext! I'll try and contribute something to give some of my own context (from a British perspective, in the '90s). (Edit: In trying to write all this, I realise it's becoming quite unwieldy and rambly, I hope it all makes sense/is useful!) Technology Connections is about learning how things work and exploring new things, right? So imagine you're a curious young person, it's the 80s/90s, you don't have a huge amount of money, technology is hard to come by, even comics and magazines cost money that you might not have. But you have a family TV, as most people did (and, unlike a computer, you didn't have to beg your parents to buy one). Now imagine discovering that you could program a computer to make it do what you want, or imaging discovering the internet for the first time. That was kinda how teletext felt to use it for the first time (at least for someone inclined to find such things interesting). Obviously, especially in the analogue era, television was all about video, that was what it did, it was a purely one-way portal into TV shows and movies, you passively watch whatever's on TV right now. But teletext made it feel like you'd added something completely new, just like when you plugged a Commodore 64 or an NES into your TV. It was a completely different role for the TV to play, something that you previously wouldn't have expected a TV to be capable of, but it was right there, built inside the TV, and all you had to do was press the "TEXT" button. It didn't cost any money, no extra decoder boxes to buy, or TV subscriptions to sign up for, or dial-up phone bills to pay. All you needed was a modern-ish TV and a TV antenna (which, at the time, most people already had mounted to their roof, that was the primary method of receiving TV here at the time). It being so accessible also meant that if you were bored with whatever was on TV at the time (which, for most people in the UK, consisted of just 3-5 channels, depending on the time period), you could just idly browse around the seemingly endless info (if not necessarily relevant - but content is content, like reading the in-flight magazine just because it's there). If you got bored of /that/ too, well, each channel had a different set of teletext pages, so you could just flip to another channel and read all those pages too. BBC1 and BBC2 did share some pages, as did ITV and Channel 4, but each service would have at least some amount of unique content, so it was worth checking out related channels. For some periods of time, there were also sub-services such as 4-Tel (Channel 4), these were provided by different entities to the main teletext service and were available on a particular set of page numbers, and they would provide content that was, for example, specific to television programmes or the TV channel itself, rather than the general content provided by the rest of that channel's teletext service. They were essentially just more teletext pages, like all the others, but they had different branding and the header line would display differently (the bit at the top with the page numbers, the clock, etc), but again to a younger technically-inclined person this was interesting. But anyway, now you've discovered you can use this other mode of your TV (for actually useful reasons, not just nerdy timewasting), what do you do with it? Well, for me, as a young person at the time, initially I used it the "usual" way, the way "normal" people did. Use it to look up the TV guide and plan what I wanted to watch that day; the childrens' programmes, the technology programmes, and so forth. Perhaps your father would use it to watch the football (soccer) scores come in, more or less live. Your mother might look to the lifestyle pages for some new recipes. There were letters pages, agony aunt columns, even games. But as a nerd with occasionally unfettered access to the family (and later, my own) TV, well, now I want to know what all of the pages do. What's on page 392? How about 647? What's the highest page number I can go to? Why can't I go to page 900? Ooh, what's this weird page full of symbols? What's all this "engineering page" stuff? (Regarding those latter two, the page full of symbols was the "clock cracker", a page designed to try to break the clock of the teletext decoder on old televisions, which were not necessarily as reliable or accurate as the newer models would get to be. The idea being that two alternating symbols with particular bit patterns, which could easily be misinterpreted if the decoder's clock signal was inaccurate, would display as other characters in case of a clock error. A TV engineer might use this to diagnose and fix a misbehaving teletext decoder. The engineering/test pages, other than the clock cracker, were often simply patterns of text and graphics designed to exercise the decoder's functionality, usually by displaying content using all of the features, such as double-height text, flashing text, different colour combinations, etc.) Touching on the subject of games, Bamboozle was a huge favourite of many British teletext users (as I'm sure you'll have heard). It was part of the Channel 4 teletext service and was a quiz game in a similar play style to (but predating) "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?". You would be presented with a question, and you would press the corresponding coloured (red/green/yellow/blue) button on your remote control (this required Fastext, a feature older TVs did not have, essentially a set of four colour-coded links on each page for numberless navigation). If you got the answer right, you would be taken to the next question. If you got it wrong, you would go to a "you got it wrong" page, and be instructed to press a button to go back. At the end you would be given a list of score ranges and a description of how well that meant you'd done. You could cheat if you were so inclined, if you pressed the coloured buttons quickly enough, three of them would cause the TV to display the same page number (these would be the "wrong answer" page), and the other would cause it to display a different number (the next question page). Defeats the point of playing a quiz game, really, and it doesn't take long to trial-and-error a question you don't know the answer to, but it was a fun trick to discover. A related note to make here is that Bamboozle used hex page numbers, so you couldn't directly key in the page number for a particular question (as the remote control had no A, B, C, D, E, or F keys). These hex-numbered pages could theoretically be used for anything you didn't want to be easily visible/accessible to a TV-based viewer, although to this day I'm not really sure if they were used for anything super secret - doing so wouldn't necessarily have been "secure" because computer-based teletext receivers existed, so a home user - albeit a tiny minority of home users - may still have been able to view that content. You mention Digitiser (Channel 4, later replaced by GameCentral), this was an irreverent video game themed magazine with humourous reviews, characters, news and video game sales charts, letters pages, and even a comic strip featuring "Turner The Worm". It was one of a number of magazine-style sections, another being Planet Sound (also Channel 4, less humour-based, and on the subject of music rather than video games). I know there were more, but my memory is fuzzy at this point, although luckily there's an ongoing effort to recover teletext pages from VHS tapes (which I've been intending to get involved with for months now...), so hopefully that will jog some memories. This message is already ridiculously long and meandering (there's a lot to cover), so I'll end here, but I'd be more than happy to expand on anything I've written or talk about more aspects if doing so would be useful. Good luck with the episode!

settopboxing

Not a bad idea indeed for a cross-over video! Would be a cool topic to show from the perspective of both sides of the ocean, as that seems to be the core of the struggle.

Compuart

First of all, you simply do you! Don't interpret any of the comments as 'expectations', but rather people being thrilled about the subject. Your channel has made me excited about analogue television, something I had taken for granted so far. My excitement about teletext wouldn't have been there, had I not seen your videos on the analogue television first. Also, take all the time you need, don't rush if it doesn't feel good. When I saw teletext as a kid for the first time, I was amazed with the color graphics (as pixelated as they would appear nowadays). Later on we'd get our own teletext capable television. The anticipation of entering a number, seeing the indexes go by, and waiting for the page to load. Most remotes came with buttons allowing you to keep watching TV, while your page would be loaded. Teletext was a treasure trove of pages (yes, it is still alive and kicking in the Netherlands, but only for the more popular categories, like news, sports, weather, TV guide, stocks). Everyone here had their own favorite set of pages and would have memorized the numbers of those pages. During dull moments on TV (and 20 years ago, there were plenty of those) they would check out what was new. Next to the popular categories, there were also puzzle pages (using the 'reveal' button to provide the answer), there was a daily chess challenge, there were pages showing sent in letters, etc. In general, I don't think there was a single success factor. It helped that there was something to be found for everyone. And the availability of current information at any time was really unique. I guess that sensation would nowadays have been replaced by mobile push notifications and other internet services.

Compuart

As Sandro said, the teletext information is still available in modern MPEG2 Transport Stream files recorded from digital satellite and ready to be viewable on VLC Player, for example - if you want to experience it. I never really used it. For me it was always too slow and I just used a printed TV magazine to get info about the current show. And I never used any additional Teletext features like interactive(?) things promoted in some shows because going to fullscreen Teletext meant missing something from the actual show.

Martin

Forgot to mention Pages From Ceefax and Teletext in-vision, which were filler "programming", usually during the early hours of the morning, consisting of a rebroadcasting of groups of teletext pages in traditional TV video format, accompanied by stock music. A magical, musical, nerdy night-light and soothing jukebox for the insomniac set (and students, of course). Although it lacked the interactivity of actual teletext, it did still convey some relevant information, such as the latest news headlines or, in the case of some ITV regions, job vacancies.

settopboxing

To understand the context of the era of teletext, you have to know that local phone calls in Europe were not free like it was in the US. It was actually pretty expensive. So there was no connecting freely to your local BBS to get computerized information. Teletext was hitching a ride with television broadcast to make such information available for free. When you're done with teletext, you might want to look into Minitel, the french videotex network which was quite unique in its time.

Listen. If this subject is doing your head in right now, then can it. Move on to something you are happier with......we'll wait. BTW who remembers BBC Clock Cracker? :-)

Colin Grimshaw

I'm afraid I might be a little late to the party but I'll try to help anyway. Here in Italy the state television is called RAI and its Teletext service is called Televideo. RAI's Televideo is still active and you can access it here https://www.servizitelevideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp In the 80s and 90s, teletext as a whole was quite popular in Italy and pretty much all television channels offered it, with various degrees of content. Everyone just called it Televideo, even if in theory the service itself was called Teletext and Televideo was just the name for RAI's particular teletext service. (Wikipedia mentions this, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televideo_(teletext) ) I remember that it was commonly used by a lot of people (I would say most people except perhaps the most technologically averse, such as very old people), to do stuff such as check the latest news or browse TV program listings. As many commenters already noted, it was basically a rudimentary internet before the internet (minus the ability to directly interact with it). Also, it was a source of almost-real-time information on sports, essentially soccer (which, as you may know, is a HUGE deal in Italy), and a lot of people used it to check matches results. In 90s Italy it was not at all uncommon to walk into a bar on a Sunday afternoon (when soccer matches are played) and find a TV tuned to a Televideo page showing match results in realtime (the actual matches were only broadcast by expensive satellite subscription tv). It was also used for subtitles, as in other countries, and I remember some TV programs using it pretty much like one would use a website now: for instance, a cooking program might publish the recipes of the day on its Televideo page, and so on. As someone mentioned above, some smaller/shadier TV stations used it to run dating/messaging services too, on which you could "post" messages by calling obscenely expensive phone lines. I also want to mention that just a few days ago, on the bus, I noticed a man of maybe 50 or 60 using the browser on its smartphone to access Televideo. This made me smile, as whatever information he was trying to find was probably already on the internet anyway, but I think it's a testament to how simple, well-tested technologies just don't want to die so easily.

In Sweden it's called TextTV and it's still in use, at least by the public service state owned TV, they've preserved it even if they went over to only digital TV years ago. They have a web version of it too, that you can try out if you want to, even if it's in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/svttext/tvu/pages/100.html 20-30 years ago, it was used a lot more than it is today. There were pages with quiz, since Teletext has support for hidden text that was only shown when pressing a button on the remote. There were pages where you could phone a number and through the dial pad write messages that showed up in the Teletext page. This was used for dating services on some channels. There were hidden pages that were not announced on any index pages, so you had to know the number to go to. Sometimes, it was just an image, and some pages contained detailed minute by minute program schedule. Most useful from an accessibility point of view was probably the subtitles support. All programs produced by the state owned TV in Sweden had subtitles through teletext, each channel had its own page. This worked because Teletext can be set to have transparent background showing over the normal TV signal. A more technical aspect of how it worked, was that you had to wait some time for the page you wanted to appear, since they were sent out one page at a time. The TV waited for the page you wanted to appear and showed it on screen. Some pages like the 100 start page was sent more often than others, to reduce the initial waiting. Newer TVs later got caching, so it picked up and stored the last version of each page, to show it directly when going to the page. The encoding for the information used Manchester encoding to provide error detection and error correction. Bad reception on the TV also meant bad Teletext, but since there was error detection built-in, the TV knew what parts that was probably not correct, and when the page was broadcast again, it would update the parts of the page that were detected to have errors. Staying on the same page during bad reception usually made the Teletext image better and better.

I really used teletext often as a kid and i still use it to this day sometimes. It's kinda funny that the teletext signals are still sent inside the MPEG Container. I'm not sure on what kind of info you are interested, like you said, for us it was absolutly normal. I always though that USA had Teletext too. You can contact me if you like. I have a digital-to-analog converter from my tv provider, but its RF out is very likely just a passthrough. But i have some old VHS tapes which may contain teletext. Again, hit me up with any questions or request you have. I'd be glad if I could help.

Sandro Huber

Make the video that YOU are excited about making. You’ve built a channel that a lot of people like by telling stories and talking about things from YOUR point of view, as they’re interesting to YOU. Make sure you don’t feel that you need to apologize to or capitulate to others. If former users of this technology don’t like the video you made, they can make their own damn one. As the great quotation reminds us, it’s not the critic that counts.

I see you’re already planning a different approach, which is great. But I also wanted to point out that some videos will take more research than others, possible months of background research, until you feel like you understand enough to explain it to others. Accepting that’s true, and allowing space for it, is less frustrating than feeling like you’re failing (and that’s the feeling I’m hearing this post; but you’re not failing, just discovering there’s a lot to learn). Reaching out to others for details is a good step, but you also run into the expert/beginner problem: it’s hard for the expert who has been surrounded by something for years to know what the beginner doesn’t know, and thus calibrate explanations at the right level/detail. In my experience on the beginner side that struggle is part of learning anything new, except maybe where the expert side is someone *really* good at teaching beginners and anticipating what they need to know in what order (which in turn often depends on the person and their background). In short, I’m not surprised it’s hard. It’s okay to do something else and work on learning more in the background. And it’s totally fine if you talk about TeleText history in 6-12 months time, rather than 6-12 days time. Ewen

Ewen McNeill

Teletext was a magic button the the remote control. When you presses it a page would appear (slowly, usually slowly due to data transfer speeds). The landing page usually had some news updates and a menu showing the numbers you would enter to access stuff like news, weather and so on. But you didn’t care. What I did care about, and I remember the menu number is pressed to this day, was under page 999. And that was? No idea. Completely forgot. Indeed, I had to search until I found an essay by one of the creators to identify it: subtitles! His post is here: http://www.astra2sat.com/teletext/ceefax-and-oracle/ subtitles! We forget how magical those were back in the day. You could not hear something? 999 can help! Foreign movie playing that looked interesting but was beyond your 10 year old understanding? 999! I do recall opening teletext and pressing 999 right away, without waiting for the home page to load. That worked sometimes. What is interesting is that this gives you some idea of how slow the system was and how uninterested someone like me was in its multitude of context. This brings me to the next interesting point of my story. Occasionally I would think that I should explore teletext, and I did use it sometimes for news (how cool to get news when you want it!), less so for television schedules (amazing, you can see what starts in the next hour) and less so for weather (not a major concern as a kid). The rest? Never even looked at it. Despite my occasional vague feelings that I should, it was too slow and the content too unattractive. The same applied for the majority of other people I knew. Certainly kids, always subtitles or tv schedule. Adults mostly the same. I knew a couple of people who actually used teletext for content beyond this. Two middle-aged males with a liking for technology. My small sample size is six adults and four children including myself. It’s a stretch but I suspect most people fit into our usage spectrum. Did I like teletext? I liked 999. I played with news a few times, but it was a curiosity, with limited content and slow, slow loading times. The TV schedule was mildly useful. In those days shows would begin on the hour or half hour, so if your current show was a tad boring you might dip into the schedule to see options for the turn of the hour. However, for the most part you knew the schedule because it didn’t vary much, and - kids like me - would read the weekly tv magazine. The schedule was only useful on the context of “I forgot” or “I don’t normally watch tv at this time so I didn’t memorize the schedule.” Did I like teletext? It was just something that was there. Did I understand it had a wealth of features? Sure, but it was slow and most didn’t interest me. So I miss it? Of course not. It’s much easier to get subtitles now. News comes from the internet. My tv comes in streams I choose. Teletext was an interesting service that I used about 1% of. Same for most people I knew. Any love for it is nostalgia. Indeed, it had fallen so far from my mind that it was like opening a dusty draw to talk about it again. It was just weird 999 (but not what it contained) was etched into my mind.

Sounds like some good help incoming... Have you reached out to Mat at Techmoan? You are fans of each other (I think!) and there might be a fun connection to be made there (pun intended.) 😄

Russell Brower

LoL! Helpful but in a colorfully worded way?

Craig Kollai

I would like to help. Let me share my story.

In Western Canada, I grew up in the 80s and 90s with this as a staple. Cable here had 13 channels until the mid 80s and then only up to about 30 until the early 90s. I believe Teletext was always on Channel 8. My grandparents had it on as their default channel, unless hockey was on. It could be said that Teletext was the Twitter of the day. The most updated news had to wait for the 6 or 11 o'clock news, or the evening paper, and the radio on all the time wasn't conducive to visiting. The Teletext channel always had on good ol' elevator music and the news feed updated faster on than gossip at the local stitch-n-bitch gathering. The format was always in three parts. A date, time, current weather ticker was at the top 5% of the screen in red background with white font. General news was in the middle 80% of the screen in blue background with white font. The forecast, lotto numbers, and community events scrolled the bottom 5% in green background with white font. When the digital world came in, it became less Teletext and more just graphical text. I might be able to find a few pictures.

Scott Cameron

Hey, you wont step on any toes here (I posted the link to the Dutch teletext). In NL it is still alive. You have some afficionado's who still like it: quick, no adverts. But in the UK, Belgium it has been switched off. Dutch commercial channels also have turned it off. I myself haven't used it in years. So: make that episode while the tech is still alive ;-) . For some inspiration, here is an example of a review of unknown technology: the episode where Retromancave (UK) reviews Minitel (very French, also unknown to me). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g

Jaap Verhoeven

Oh man. I think, as a Brit, I can safely say that everyone had their own take on Teletext. From the ‘pages from ceefax’ that would grace our TV’s in the twilight hours after the national anthem was played at closedown and before Breakfast Time woke us all up, but also from a geeky perspective, I used to have a Teletext Box for my BBC Model B and they used to put BBC-B computer programmes in full text for you to re-type in on some of the pages in the computer section. For me? I used to love the quiz (used very clever techniques like choose your own adventure), and all the TV listings were on there too. The non-geeks would use it to catch up on the latest news or live scores from sporting fixtures. My Dad used to have it in ‘mix’ mode (where you could have the text overlaid on the channel you were watching) and have the horse racing showing from different venues. Many pages were ‘carousels’ which would rotate around multiple pages, and it would tell you which page you were on in the corner (1/6, 2/6 etc). Towards the end of it’s life, TV’s would start cacheing the pages in the background as you were watching the channel - you didn’t need to wait for the page to be broadcast - it was all cached in RAM. You could then scroll through carousel pages easily. Today it still exists as MHEG rather than legacy teletext. The Red Button on BBC is a prime example - there is still news headlines and sports results on the ‘Red Button’. And I was definitely a Ceefax (BBC) man rather than an Oracle (and then Teletext) on ITV type of guy. I nearly forgot - I also used to look forward to Christmas when they used to do the Ceefax Advent Calendar!

Mark Wayt

Sorry, I hit enter to get a new line, and it published my comment. You can now use the information you've gleaned, and anything you can get James think tank to cough up, but still be able to honestly say that you don't know what it is, and why is that? Perhaps even find some US television people to say why it wasn't adopted here. But you're reporting from what you know.

Mike Bird

Do what you can in your format. Don't burn out over a subject that might not suit you. I'e used tele text, ot Text TV as it is known in Denmark, since the late 80'es. I remember some of the pointless block logos that was attempted to be drawn. I remember how it took 30-60 seconds from when you pressed a number until it was shown - and the magic when it was shown almost instantly. The annoying multi page pages, where the page would change every about 60 seconds, of cause the system would just change which page was sent. The multi page thing was handled by software and was not part of text tv. Then magic: A commercial TV-station (Danish TV3) made a BBS style page where your could call a pay per minute phone number and use the keypad to write messages or short posts. Wov, you called the number, got at page to go to and you controlled it! Then submit and the message ended up on the official page. At some point our TV got a repair (that actually was done at one point in history) and they had a difficulty getting a part. So the (mostly) danish letters æøå got replaced by some german letters. I remember the page where you could add live sub titles of the show your was looking at. Of cause, this was a page with mostly transparant background and updates had number 1 priority, out of the normal order. But it showed some of the controls which were possible too, like hiding the top bar with the page number and clock. Clock . For many years this was my only source of a precise time. Later came technical improvements, like TVs with memory so pages were loaded instantly and 4 colours (not colors) on the remote that were mapped to 4 shortcuts. Press red to go to sports. Big baby! Text TV is still in use in Denmark by dr.dk and tv2.dk. But I haven't had it since we went over to streaming. An updated picture can be seen on https://www.dr.dk/service/tekst-tv/tekst-tv - once they were showing tekst TV (or TTV) online but not anymore :-(

Simon Mikkelsen

Actually, I think you may have found the correct take on the subject: There's this really old, really cool technology that's kinda built-in to the television standard. It was (and may still be) in everyday use in the EU (for now, Britain is still part of the EU) but was never used in the USA or even Canada. Why not?

Mike Bird

Have you considered wearing shoes while you try to film the videos rather than going barefoot? Maybe stepping out of the norm will help you through these troubling issues. Like an orange-mocha frappuccino? All joking aside, I don't think you will be feeling any pressure from people here. We are here to support you in whatever you do. Who would have thought that someone could make a toaster endearing.

The video was in my mind going to comprise three parts: Here's what it is and what it can do, Here's how it worked (and other technical bits) and Here's why it never caught on in the US. I know what it is. But I kept coming across new things that it could do. I didn't feel I had a good enough framework to speak about it with any authority, so I was hoping for some advice on what it was most useful for. A sort of "teletext's greatest hits" if you will. But alas, all I got was that alien nostalgia. I've been trying to cut through it, but to no avail

Technology Connections

The easiest way to handle this on YouTube is put out a crap 5 minute video on Ceefax, and the comments section will magically fill with all the 'helpful' information you were looking for the first time around.

Darren Pierce

Quite the conundrum, in times like this step back, reevaluate, & look at some of past work I remember some advice you gave on a similar situation in your winter range test video around the 20:00 min mark remarking about enthusiast. Same could be said about nostalgia-vision.

PiraTed

I very much understand your problem. I could understand every decision you make, but I'd say that your video would be very informative without covering every aspect those who are very much into it would like to see. It would maybe even more informative, if it in the end did not cover verything there is, but fouses on the most interesting parts. Teletext is still used in Germany by the way. It is called "Videotext" here. You can access the content on the web. https://www.ard-text.de/index.php?page=100# is the Videotext of the main public station, https://www1.wdr.de/wdrtext a local public station and on https://som-teletextviewer.sim-technik.de/tius/teletextviewer/ you can find the text of some private stations. If I may make a suggestion. Put the video on hold for now and every now and then collect new information and if you should eventually be happy with it, do the video. Do not force it and yourself into something you are not comfortable with.

Was this video always supposed to be "users of teletext wax lyrical about it" or did you intend to make a "history and use of teletext" that went off the rails? It's a pretty simple service, one that let you get news and information that the public broadcasters already had (world news, sports, weather, traffic etc.) outside of the designated newshours. Perhaps it's better to focus on the the pure functionality of the service at first instead of getting lost in some '90s nostalgia that's completely alien to you.

Valli

Used to use it for TV listings, they had news, lotto results, flight info, holiday offers (travel agents used to pay to have pages to themselves I believe). The implementation between RTE and the BBC was nearly the same in terms of page loading. ITVs was different but I've yet to discover why/how. Airtel have since moved their service onto the web and also the text/data service on the national DVB-T service via MHEG-5. Web version here https://www.rte.ie/aertel/desktopxhtml/100-1.html

Phily

I think everyone here is pretty comfortable with the idea that this should be as fun for you to produce as it is for us to watch you.

LordGodd

Two countries, divided by a common language. I say play on your lack of cultural knowledge; explore it from the outside-in.

Dude :) just do whatever makes you happy! You are pure entertainment in all your videos :) just do whatever you fancy :)

Martin Embeh

Ahh, Teletext. Still a thing here in Belgium for page 888 for subtitles! There’s no analog anymore but it’s been ported to DVB. Many channels no longer host anything but page 888 nowadays but I remember reading the news or the TV guide back when “smartphones” were flip phones with plastic keyboards and embedded Wi-Fi was still an exclusive feature on pro laptops and iBooks. The narrative is extra: I would also love a purely technical video like the videos on the very first audio recorders/players (which you probably also didn’t use)!

Constantino Tsarouhas

I used to use Aertel, which was the Irish broadcaster RTÉ version of Teletext. Remember I bought a £50IR TV from a friends dad, a massive Grundig TV from the late 80s or early 90s. One of those child killers if it fell on one :)

Phily

We watch and support your work because it oozes with your experience and personality. If making the video on Teletext takes you out of that element, don't worry about not doing it, even though you teased it. Continue to spend time making content that resonates with you so it will resonate with us. <3

Kyle Anderson

Exactly my thoughts, well said!

Markus Schumacher

This has made me seriously excited for your take on Teletext/Ceefax. Seriously. It was a huge part of my childhood, and It’s always frustrated me that it’s been (pretty much) forgotten. Digitiser was just a “magazine” - a great one, but still. Have you looked into Bamboozle? It was an interactive teletext quiz game - and a bit of a national institution for a while. The closest thing to Minitel we managed.

Adam Francis Smith

The cultural & practical depth isn't what I'm here for. It's the technical wizardry that I want to know about. Asking for advice is asking for trouble; If other people have expectations of something different than they can make their own damn YouTube Channel!

It's nice to hear such candor. In the end, this is your channel. You are the curator, the editor, the storyteller. We are ultimately here for *you*. Keep at, Alec.

Gilbert Tang

Alec, I am here (like many others) to hear YOUR stories. You are American, show us your perspective, that's what you can do best! If you want to have some non-expert thoughts from a German who grew up with Teletext in the 90s, feel free to shoot me an email or give me a call, happy to share my anecdotes and funny stories about it. Just relax and take it easy :-)

Markus Schumacher

Just do the technical video like you'd be comfortable with normally, with the admission that it's not the broader story you really want to tell... You can give everyone the same opportunities to participate in a future "Part 2" video, which may or may not happen depending on if you can actually coordinate

briandef

I'm not going to lie, if you're telling a story for others who already know it when you don't know it yourself, you're setting yourself up to fail. I think you'd have to tell it from your own perspective for it to feel authentic. I want to see their story, but if you're not comfortable telling it, it makes sense for you not to. By all means, I'm not trying to discourage you, but I think you're totally justified in your concerns about it.

Kevin Kostka

I could never be mad at you!

Dick Merritt

Good grief this is a practically a novel.

Technology Connections