The British network BBC, which had created teletext in the 70s of the last century, announced a few days ago the end of it. This closes a kind of cycle of 45 years of history, although in the case of Spain, Teletext is a little younger; It didn’t come until 1988.
We assume that everyone knows or remembers what Teletext is. Anyone who doesn’t, raise your hand. In any case, for those who are more forgetful, we want to review this rudimentary system today, but which at the time enjoyed great success and was a forerunner of the Internet.
Brief history of Teletext
It had it all: news, TV listings, sports ratings, etc. You will remember him above all for his basic design with striking texts and colors: red, green, blue, yellow… Some even became codes. For example, the color pink used to be used for the erotic content part. And yes, Teletext also had a section for erotic line announcements.
The story began, as we said, at the BBC. The British chain launched this technology for the first time in 1974 which at that time was called Ceefax and which would later begin to use the current name of Teletext, derived from the alternative service developed by Oracle. Already in the 90s, the chain would bet on the “red button” system, a similar technology that shows the user information in text form when pressing the red button on the remote control, especially news related to the BBC News channels and BBC Sport.
In Spain it would arrive at the end of the 1980s through public television (TVE), to settle already in the 1990s in the private Antena 3 and Telecinco. The original model, a variant of the one developed by Oracle, starts on page 100 and normally covers up to 899. All of them include various sections such as news, sports, services, etc.
But this free service that has accompanied us in recent decades has its end very close. Although in Spain it still works (in fact, currently 99.3% of Spanish households still have it and 2.3 million people ), the BBC announced days ago that it will stop offering the red button service, heir to traditional Teletext.
Teletext, the technology that anticipated the impact of the Internet
Before the web, Teletext was a quick and easy way to look up things. In addition to his tremendous success and popularity (the BBC estimated 2 million weekly users on its network alone), the technology was .
The pages took their time to load, and yet allowed be aware of what was happening, get information about news, football match results, for example, or about the television schedule. Who has not left the VHS recording when they knew that one of their favorite programs was playing that night? It seems that all this is at the antipodes of the digital age, and yet only a few decades have passed.
Teletext went even further. There were people who came to use it to chat and make friends remotely, to advertise (if you get involved today you can still see a lot of advertising) or to check job offers. An anachronistic form of the current Tinder, Google or Linkedin, for example. Somehow this technology advanced the success of those and prepared us for it.
Be that as it may, Teletext undoubtedly marked an era and although it is still in use, whether we like it or not, it will soon be turned off forever.
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