Teletext

One of the coolest things on your TV before digital set-top boxes, on-demand movies and Freeview.

Teletext is basically a continuously updated news feed transmitted through your TV (in gaps in the signal), developed in the UK in the 1970s and being used worldwide.

Most notable for its limited number of characters, the general BBC Micro-ish look of the thing and the fact that you'd at times have to wait for several pages to load, Teletext doesn't crash under heavy user demand. Before the Internet, this was the way you got the footy scores.

Pages have individual numbers, which can get memorable. 888 is the UK code to get Closed Captioning.

As TV becomes increasingly digital, these services are either becoming defunct or moving to a less enjoyable digital format. ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five ended their service on December 15th 2009, more than two years before the analogue cut off.

Teletext Limited, the company responsible for the ITV and Channel Four services, had a handful of other businesses, including a holiday shop TV channel, which will remain open- and oddly, continute to use the Teletext brand.


 * Ceefax (pronounced "See Facts") for the BBC. Due to end in 2012.
 * ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five's Teletext.
 * The older ORACLE system.
 * Digitiser
 * Major Polish television stations still use this, but this gets little love from the production team.