It was a thing for most of the world, I just don’t believe it really caught on in the US, it was called teletext and was really widely used.
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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we still have teletext in Ukraine even though noone really uses it. (and also we don't have analogue tv anymore, but it's still possible to use them somehow afaik)
there's even an online version of the most popular one (Intertext) which has a realtime chat feature (you can text a specific number to send your own messages, kinda like discord lol)
http://intertext.com.ua/
Can confirm. It was common here in Norway. My dad got most of his news updates and weather forcasts from there, as he was usually busy during the evening news broadcast.
I kind of miss Ceefax, the BBC's Teletext service. The immediacy meant that headlines were often broken first on Ceefax before TV or radio, but the limitations meant there was little room for overly-verbose fluff. I remember using it in the early nineties for realtime flight arrivals at our local airport, so we knew when to set off to collect my grandparents.
I remember reading about a system used somewhere else in Europe where you would call a phone line and use your phone's dialpad to navigate the Teletext on your TV - that sounds very clever.
It was done. Teletext delivered news, sports results, horoscopes, closed captions, all directly to your TV in real-time. It was quite clever as a pre-internet method to deliver text content to every home.
All the people in the comments here being unaware of this makes me feel old.
"We need a cheery headline for our upbeat vision of a bright future."
"How about a fuckload of dead people."
"No, no, it needs something else..."
"They drowned."
"You may be into something..."
"And we'll mention some are missing, suggesting that some families will never get closure and will spend the rest of their lives haunted by visions of the nightmare that might have befalled the one they loved."
"By jove! Brilliant! Okay, now about the videophone picture..."
"How about a wife getting a call about her husband from the coastguard..."
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