this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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internet funeral
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Unfortunately no, we missed this important piece of technology
Not really though. In Europe teletext was very prominent (and is still available today, at least here in Germany). It’s basically a newspaper on the TV.
Now, the only person I know who still uses it is my granddad who wishes nothing more than for the internet to be more like the teletext.
There are apps that show teletext which, acording to some, are quite popular. It does somehow fit into a retro scifi aesthetic too if one's into that kind of thing 😄
Back in the day, I had an application that could decode teletext from a TV capture card. And there are PC based DTV receivers that can also do that.
And over here in Finland, the national public broadcaster has the teletext on web. (Yle is the last network to put any effort in teletext - the commercial channels like MTV3 and Nelonen used to have a whole bunch of teletext stuff like premium SMS based chats, but those aren't really all that profitable these days. I think MTV3 still has that, but they're shutting it down next year.)
Based granddad
It’s also still a thing in Sweden too. Nowadays it can be viewed from a website or an app. There’s even CLI clients so you can view “text tv” on the command line: https://github.com/voidcase/txtv
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My granddads problem is rather, that it’s impossible to use the internet without sending data to the internet while the teletext is downstream only.
If people were willing to make content with just text it could be done with plain old HTML and HTTP. W3C is not pointing a gun at anyone's head and forcing them to write 100MB of JavaScript for every page. Having a new protocol just increases the barrier to a text-first internet.
Advertisement, denial of privacy surveys and paywalls ensured that.