Since I found out about teletext being used as subtitles in some PAL discs. I got bit interested about teletext. Believe or not here in Finland it's still going on. Heck in 2018 I took a picture of a teletext post which basically said they got almost million readers per daily back then. (And our population is 5.5 million)

Anyway there's only 3 channels here still with teletext. Those being YLE (kind of Finnish BBC), MTV's and channel 4's (though this one is just shows a link to their website.)

So we basically got 2 channels with teletext. So I'm wondering does teletext still exist where you live. Or did you even have it in the first place?

In the US we don't use Teletext. We use Closed Captions. I'm pretty sure most channels here still support it as most cable services give you the ability to turn closed captions on through your cable box.

The standard way of having your TV decode closed captions doesn't work if you have your video source going through an HDMI connection. Since they still include Closed Caption capabilities on all TVs here in the US, I have to imagine that you can still get Closed Captions from an over the air signal.

Here's a video explaining how Closed Captions work if you're interested:



I do believe many TVs here in the US do support Teletext as there are several options in the Closed Caption menus that include "TEXT1, TEXT2, TEXT3" along with "CC1, CC2, CC3," etc.

Teletext is almost dead in the UK. However it's still used in standard definition channels on digital satellite (specifically channels on the Sky platform which is... pretty much all of them) to carry subtitles only, as early Sky boxes couldn't decode DVB subtitles so Teletext subtitles were used. Also had the added bonus that the box would insert the Teletext data into the VBI as usual, so if you recorded to S-VHS (in pre-PVR days) you would still have soft subtitles you could see using Teletext on your TV. Incidentally off-air S-VHS recordings are where much of the modern archives of Teletext pages in the 90s and 2000s come from.

Digital terrestrial broadcasts have never carried Teletext in the UK (instead preferring the MHEG-based digital text system; and this too now is rarely used any more, at least compared to its heyday a decade and a half ago), and I honestly don't know about digital cable as I've never received TV through it. So Teletext as a service used for actually delivering information died here shortly before the end of analogue broadcasts (the commercial broadcasts of it died a little earlier, but the BBC switched off their Teletext service, Ceefax, I think when the majority of the country had undergone digital switchover).

Teletext was long used here as a good way of getting information through your TV - in the days before home internet access was commonplace it must have been pretty cool to be able to receive news, weather, and a bunch more such information through your TV. The BBC had Ceefax, ITV and Channel 4 had ORACLE at first, later being confusingly branded just Teletext when it was taken over by Teletext Ltd, and Channel 5 had 5 Text. Each service had different information available, and sometimes for technical reasons (capacity limitations of the Teletext signal) the things you could get would be different depending on channel. Teletext pages had a three-digit number (internally these were hex digits I believe but the public could obviously only use decimal digits), and each page could have subpages. Cheap receivers wouldn't bother to store more than one Teletext page at a time, so when you typed a number you would have to wait several seconds for that page to be broadcast - commonly-used pages could be broadcast more often than uncommonly used ones. If it were a multi-page news article, again on cheap receivers you would then have to wait for the first subpage to come around in the broadcast, and make sure you read the page before waiting for the next one to load (I tended to find they were timed well so that you would have time to read a whole page before the next subpage came, but equally this meant if there were say five subpages and you loaded the page on subpage 2, that's quite a long wait to get round to the start). More sophisticated receivers (mostly in mid-2000s TVs) would store every page it received so could instantly access any page, and also allowed you to choose which subpage you wanted to see.

Last time I checked (and this was several years ago) there were a few stragglers on satellite which still had stubs of Teletext services, but only a very small handful and usually just in the form of an index page telling you to visit their website instead (one memorable example actually encoded a QR code with teletext graphics, something I never thought I'd see!).

Teletext played a notable part in the British home computer industry of the early 1980s, as when the BBC were running a computer literacy programme and wanted an official computer to be partnered with it, they decided it'd be useful for it to have a Teletext chip in it. So when Acorn won that contract and produced the BBC Micro, sure enough along with the more usual bitmap graphics chip in the system, there was another chip, accessible by requesting graphics mode 7, that was simply a Teletext chip as you would expect to find in any TV of the era. This provided a very nice to use text mode with quite nice fonts (especially compared with the bitmap mode) and low memory usage, and of course the ability to draw crude Teletext style graphics, which were all made in text mode (basically Teletext has some graphics characters which draw blocks in certain combinations, along with some special characters which do things like changing the foreground and background colour, or toggling various behaviour like what character to print when one of these control characters is received - bearing in mind that each character still takes up a "space" on screen even if it's doing something like changing colour, which helps explain the very characteristic look that Teletext graphics have). Anyway thanks to this Teletext chip Acorn were easily able to produce a Teletext Adaptor which allowed you to connect your BBC Micro to an aerial and receive Teletext pages through it, including most notably computer programs broadcast over the air. I also have in my possession, and probably the real reason the BBC wanted a Teletext chip in their machine, a BBC Master computer that was adapted to serve as an authoring device for Ceefax pages - it works and comes complete with software to write pages and send them off presumably around the BBC's internal network. Obviously the network is long gone but the software still works; having in my collection a device which the BBC actually used to create Teletext pages is cool beyond words, speaking as someone who has always had a soft spot for Teletext.

Anyway, hopefully this braindump of mine about Teletext was interesting for you. There are a bunch of websites out there that document and preserve examples of Teletext pages through the ages, and one particularly interesting site written by a guy who built their own receiver and recorded some very early Teletext broadcasts, along with going into more technical details about it, which is a pretty amazing resource to have now.

And the "TEXT" option on Closed Captions decoders is sadly not Teletext. I believe it was intended to be a similar system for the US though basically using the Closed Caption standard, but it was never actually a thing as far as i know. I don't think it could possibly have been as interactive as Teletext though; it sounds like there would have been just three or four pages available, rather than the up to 800 publicly-accessible pages with Teletext.

Very helpful info/summary muzer, thanks.

In germany almost every single TV channel I can think of has teletext.
I use it daily to check for news and sports results.
A very convenient thing.

I was a little miffed to discover they no longer had a proper teletext service. I always used to to look up TV schedules.

Teletext aka prehistoric internet. I think it still exists in Holland but I hadn't had a TV subscription in years so I can't try it out.

There was a thread not so long back where I think it was ertoili, confederate and myself were discussing s-vhs off-air recordings that were made during the 90s where the teletext info e.g. news, weather, travel info & tv programming etc. at the time of recording was preserved and still accessible 25 plus years later if your tv is fitted with the decoder. It certainly feels a bit spooky and more than bit like being in a time warp! I think muzer in his post above was hinting at this, it sadly doesn't work with low band vhs off air recordings though.

Yeah, the teletext info is stored in the vertical blanking intervals, same as closed captions, which is stored on VHS tapes just the same, but because of the low resolution of VHS is pretty much complete gibberish and teletext in the analog had a tendency to go wonky if the reception was even slightly below good. However, S-VHS resolution is probably good enough for the signal to still be legible.

Really wish I had S-VHS recordings like that. Imagine being able to not just watch the movie/episode/whatever but actually access news, weather, sports and TV listings at the time of broadcast, too!

Yep, I guess teletext really highlighted just how crappy regular vhs really was

I've got quite a few BBC off-air S-VHS recordings from around late 1992 - 1996(ish) anything from documentaries, movies & concerts and have a Panasonic NVS-F88 S-VHS deck bought new in 1992 which is still going strong, what I don't have currently is a tv with a teletext decoder as the Panasonic is still plumbed into my PJ based home theatre setup, however all that could be about to change as I'm looking at replacing the Sony PJ with a large oled panel so if this is fitted with a decoder I should be able to view the long lost analog text once again