@Gilanas
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.
@alexander191297
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!
@DoreenManning
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.
@mred5625
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.
@stevemac6707
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
@PanixATK
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
@g-rated-g
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
@idj20
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.
@peterlee5535
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!
@mikrikbell
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.
@andrzejprokesz34
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...
@TheOttomila
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
@user-is7xs1mr9y
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.
@grahambartram7944
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...
@think-forge
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.
@mashisma
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
@phil6844
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.
@Raven1110
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.
@CommodoreFan64
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.
@TheJevonjames