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Teletext in North America

>>> 2025-08-25 teletext in north america (PDF) I have an ongoing fascination with "interactive TV": a series of efforts, starting in the 1990s and continuing today, to drag the humble living room television into the world of the computer. One of the big appeals of interactive TV was adoption, the average household had a TV long before the average household had a computer.

Its premier holding, KSL-TV of Salt Lake City, has an influence larger than its name suggests: KSL was carried by an extensive repeater network and reached a large portion of the population throughout the Mountain States. The director of public affairs at KSL, asked about this odd conundrum of a nearly five-year-old service that you could not buy, pointed out that electronics manufacturers were hesitant to mass produce an inexpensive teletext decoder as long as it was unclear which of several standards would prevail. Based on the model of Ceefax, the CRC designed a system called Telidon that worked over television (in a more teletext-like fashion) or phone lines (like videotex), with the capability of publishing far more detailed graphics than the simple box drawings of teletext.

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