Many people know it, but who actually still actively uses teletext or videotext? A little history lesson.
British television engineers in the mid-1970s discovered life in the so-called “blanking interval” of the broadcast signal. At that time there was only analogue image transmission. In Europe, the so-called PAL system was the standard, with a picture consisting of 625 picture lines. However, the British discovered that 576 lines were sufficient to transmit the image content. The resulting difference is what TV technicians call the blanking interval. And this gap can be filled, for example with text information. This eventually developed into teletext, a kind of Twitter for the boob tube generation.
Britain as a pioneer
The discovery of the blanking gap and the opportunities it offered quickly found widespread acceptance in other European countries. In the pioneering country of Great Britain, teletext started as early as 1974, initially in black and white. It won’t be colorful until later, although colorful with a maximum of six colors that can be displayed probably doesn’t describe the format correctly.
In Germany, Bayerischer Rundfunk first tested what is possible in the blanking interval. In 1977, ARD and ZDF then presented the first joint teletext offer to the general public at the International Consumer Electronics Fair in Berlin. However, there were already discussions about the name at that time.
Because at the same time he was tinkering the Deutsche Bundespost in their video text offer – short: BTX. With BTX, a kind of German precursor of the Internet started in the 1980s. However, when the Internet actually became a reality, BTX quickly disappeared from the scene again.
Teletext starts in Germany as Videotext
In any case, those responsible at ARD and ZDF discussed the name of the new television information channel until the early 1980s. The German compromise for the teletext offer of the public broadcasters was then: teletext. Below that, most people know the service in Germany to this day.
In 1980, the so-called teletext regular operation of ARD and ZDF started. In fact, both broadcasters have operated the service together for two decades. At that time, the leading editorial office was the responsibility of the broadcaster “Freies Berlin” (SFB for short). Until the year 2000, the SFB jointly took care of the content of the teletext pages.
TV viewers love teletext right from the start. At the start, there were only about 70,000 TV sets that could display the service on the screen at all. However, the number of teletext-capable televisions rose rapidly due to the great demand.
The pages and sections soon became engraved on the viewers’ minds. Only about 800 pages were technically transferrable, strictly sorted from home page 100 to 899; the last page. Each page can display no more than 25 lines with a maximum of 40 characters. It was a real challenge for the teletext editors to squeeze all the news and information into this tight corset in the shortest possible time. After all, teletext aims to provide viewers with the most up-to-date information possible.
Will the Internet become the final enemy for teletext?
However, from the 1990s, teletext faced powerful competition. Because the aspiring Internet doesn’t need a blanking period. There, the websites land on the home PC via the World Wide Web. In addition, much more content and, above all, colorful and moving images can be distributed over it, while teletext still distributes block graphics, like from the good old days of home computers.
At peak times, more than 10 million Germans watched video text from ARD and ZDF every day to find out about news from all over the world, stock market news or sporting events, but today there are still slightly more than 7 million users. It still sounds impressive, but the number now refers to all TV stations, including private providers. Because now almost every television station also operates a videotext or teletext, as the service is now also called in Germany.
The teletext signal has long since stopped coming through the blanking interval, but is displayed on the screen together with other digital data streams. Analog television is now history. Digitization is also creating completely new reception experiences on the television market.
Teletext as a constant
Only teletext has hardly changed its format. It’s been around since 2010 a new form of transmission called HbbTV. This can now also be combined with content from the Internet. The teletext makers leave the cold. Nothing has changed in the basic scheme. Even in the new format, the pure transmission of information via text still dominates.
Incidentally, in Great Britain, the motherland of teletext, the text-based information service has long been switched off. With digitization on the television market, the British have banished teletext to mothballs.
In Germany, on the other hand, teletext is still present. Even after more than 40 years, there is still no end in sight. On the contrary: Teletext pages can now also be called up on the Internet – of course, just like in the old days, without a lot of frills. The journey through time 1980’s TV world is just a button, sorry, click away.