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Sunday, December 20, 2009
Across The Pond: End of Beeb's Teletext Service
The grandmother to the internet, the UK's Teletext service was mostly shut
down this week due to lack of advert revenue. (Only the racing &
bookmaking, chat and dating services will remain open - can you guess
why ?)
Teletext never caught on here, but across the pond it was quite popular in the 1980s and 1990's and it had some success in France (Antiope) and in the Netherlands (Prestel). It was worked in a similar fashion to the US Closed Captioning system, but I guess us Yanks wanted two-way communication, so we got MCI Mail, then Delphi, Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie and finally AOL.