Videotex and Teletext

For a relatively brief period during the 1970s and into the early 1990s, these twin technologies appeared to offer a viable means of transforming the news (and many other) businesses. Videotex (spelled without the final “t”) worked through cable while teletext used part of the television over-the-air transmission channel. Both services offered access to a digital database of information that could be ordered up—as text and very basic graphics—on a television screen. Save for one exception, however, none of the several technical systems survived long (though the French Minitel operation lasted for about two decades). Today the Internet offers far more breadth and depth of service, is accessed more easily, and is presented in finer graphic form. But the Internet as we know it today did not then exist, and the personal computer was a brand-new and expensive technology. Development of these services began in Britain British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) engineers discovered a way of using spare capacity in the television channel's vertical blanking interval (VBI, the thick black bar that separates television pictures and is normally not seen). Originally developed for the use of those hard of hearing, and then applied only internally, the resulting BBC teletext system was announced in 1972, and a public test of the “Ceefax” (“see facts”) system began two years later. British independent (commercial) television offered an advertiser-supported teletext service called “Oracle” by 1977. Although this system began with only about 30 “pages” or screens of information, by utilizing more of the VBI, they had ramped up to 600 or so by the early 1980s, serving an audience of 1.5 million homes with television receivers equipped to decode the signals. Content initially echoed and then expanded upon the main broadcast channel—program listings, expanded information from newscasts, and directory services. Videotex (called viewdata in Britain) was introduced by the British Post office as “Prestel” in 1976. By the early 1980s, it hosted more than 150 service providers providing hundreds of pages of largely directory-type information to a largely business audience (the service had failed to penetrate the expected residential market). All of these services lasted into the early [Page 1428]1990s; after that, computer-based Internet offerings proved far superior.

France's National Center for Telecommunications Studies began to develop its “Antiope” videotex/teletext system in the early 1970s as well. A videotex service marketed as “Teletel” was by 1981 providing stock market and agricultural reports, news and weather, and traffic updates, adding up to thousands of available pages of information. Beginning a year later, French Telecom sought to end the expense of regularly updating and publishing paper telephone directories with its “Minitel” videotex system, which developed rapidly thanks to the utility giving away the “dumb” terminals that looked a bit like later laptop computers but lacked their capabilities. Service users were then charged depending on the type of information and amount used, much as was the case with telephone service. By 1990, Minitel reached about 5.5 million subscribers, or about a quarter of the French population, doubling that by the end of the century. Although French Telecom sought to make their terminals Internet friendly, the long-lasting system had largely disappeared by 2005, pushed out by far more capable personal computers and widespread Internet services.

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