I bought my first Closed Captioning device in 1976. PBS stations in selected cities were using NTSC Line 21/22 for all their captioning and one-way tele-texbtbox needs (CC2/TEXT).
Also Sacramento NBC 3 started delivering closed-captioning in 1977.
In Switzerland, Teletext somehow proved popular enough you can now access the content (with the same nostalgic look and feel, modulo some advertising) online and on a mobile app.
i used to work at KSL! we did some other crazy interactive tv early in the social media era… we actually won an emmy for creating a completely interactive tv show.
In 1988 I worked for around a year for a company which used NAPLPS for various Data Broadcast advertising devices.
It actually had quite impressive graphics capabilities, although the vector graphics took some time to draw (using NEC V30 CPUs), and an additional graphics
processor chip (made my Intel if I recall).
Data Broadcast being a commercial use of the UK TV channel for various things, i.e. essentially a commercialization of the data channel over which Teletext was sent, Teletext had some of the flyback lines, DB had some others.
Teletext had a better run in Europe for the same reason as public transport: higher population density. It is more economical when you can spread the cost over more customers. In places as sparsely populated as flyover US & Canada, the cost of maintaining a teletext presence wasn't worth the handful of contacts you'd get out of it. Boston or New York could have benefited, but for the rest of the country, it was brutally outperformed by the cork board.
Teletext is one way. Your receiver decodes the page you request, but you have no uplink.
Teletext was made by major broadcasters, so NBC/ABC/CBS in the US might have had a service. It is just broadcasted as part of the signal, so the actual hardware is in the end users device. All TV's in the UK and Europe just had teletext decoders built in as standard. The cost of entry was not high at all. The only expense was updating the content. But honestly, that wasn't really a massive effort unless you wanted a lot of graphics (ASCII style, obviously.) It was a bout as much effort as a local news paper or a well maintained BBS.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, station WFLD introduced a teletext service called Keyfax, built on Ceefax technology as a joint venture with Honeywell and telecom company Centel.
To try and solve the chicken-and-egg problem with the adoption of teletext decoders, Keyfax started in Chicago by broadcasting a static rotation of the data pages all through the overnight hours. It was kind of fascinating to watch back then.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] threadSubtitles at page 888 too, where the subs could be overlaid on top of a movie instead of the full TTXT page.
Also Sacramento NBC 3 started delivering closed-captioning in 1977.
FCC didn’t standardize until 1980.
I still have the decoder box.
https://vintagecomputer.ca/agvision-videotex-terminal/
https://www.teletext.ch/
https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/teletext/id308630240?l=en-GB
ssh teletekst.nl
It actually had quite impressive graphics capabilities, although the vector graphics took some time to draw (using NEC V30 CPUs), and an additional graphics processor chip (made my Intel if I recall).
Data Broadcast being a commercial use of the UK TV channel for various things, i.e. essentially a commercialization of the data channel over which Teletext was sent, Teletext had some of the flyback lines, DB had some others.
Teletext was made by major broadcasters, so NBC/ABC/CBS in the US might have had a service. It is just broadcasted as part of the signal, so the actual hardware is in the end users device. All TV's in the UK and Europe just had teletext decoders built in as standard. The cost of entry was not high at all. The only expense was updating the content. But honestly, that wasn't really a massive effort unless you wanted a lot of graphics (ASCII style, obviously.) It was a bout as much effort as a local news paper or a well maintained BBS.
To try and solve the chicken-and-egg problem with the adoption of teletext decoders, Keyfax started in Chicago by broadcasting a static rotation of the data pages all through the overnight hours. It was kind of fascinating to watch back then.
https://youtu.be/Bgs0kbxo68w