Discussion Essay
Videotext/Teletext--The Web that wasn't
by Johnathan L. Wright
October 10, 2001

Videotext was a format for delivering information electronically that had its heyday in the 1980s. Videotext was the forerunner of today’s Web-based information services. Videotext used a television set as a monitor, a telephone line or cable to carry information in the form of digital signals, and an adapter to decode these signals. Ordinary television sets could not display videotext without this adapter. Users controlled the content they viewed with a keypad or keyboard connected to the terminal. Videotext was interactive. Users could retrieve information, send an early form of e-mail, and perform various business calculations (such as accounting functions). Content took the form of both text and image, although they appeared primitive by today’s standards.

The International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee suggested the term videotext be used to refer to both interactive and one-way broadcast information services. Teletext, however, was the more accurate term for services that were one-way only. Teletext worked through the insertion of digital data into unused parts of normal television signals. Like videotext, users had a decoder and a keypad that allowed them to switch between the teletext broadcast and regular television. British Broadcasting Corporation engineers invented teletext around 1972, and the service is still offered in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and many other countries around the world.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, corporate colossi began experimenting with electronic information delivery. Some of the experimenters and their programs included GTE’s Viewdata, CompuServe’s MicroNet, Telecommunications Corporation of America’s The Source, and AT&T’s Electronic Information Service (EIS). Other companies that experimented with such programs included Dow Jones with Apple II, Reuters with News-Views, Warner Bros. with Qube Service, and, most famously, newspaper chains Knight-Ridder with Viewtron and the Times Mirror Co. with Gateway.

Videotext and teletext enthralled American newspaper executives. They envisioned the medium as a new way to deliver news, sports, weather, and entertainment–much of it interactive–to millions of their readers. Videotext would be an electronic complement to their paper publications, one that their subscribers–especially organizational subscribers–would pay to enjoy.

Times Mirror started Gateway in Southern California in 1982. Knight Ridder began the Viewtron trial in Florida in 1983. Viewtron comprised news, weather, sports, business, and entertainment data that was transmitted by telephone line and with which viewers could interact. Gateway offered similar services in a one-way teletext format. Gateway cost Times Mirror $30 million and closed in 1986. Knight-Ridder poured $50 million into Viewtron and closed it in 1986, too. Both companies cut their multi-million dollar losses and canceled plans to expand their electronic information services. CBS and NBC, which had offered teletext in certain markets, abandoned the service in the late 1980s.

The main reason, of course, was lack of subscribers. The combined subscriber base for Viewtron and Gateway was less than 25,000. Potential viewers didn’t understand what videotext and teletext were and what they could do. There was no "take-home" value for either the individual or the institutional user. And while the ultimate choices consumers make cannot always be quantified or thoroughly articulated, there were technical limitations with videotext and teletext that undoubtedly kept potential subscribers away. Some of these limitations are set forth below:

• Videotext and teletext used television to display text, something for which it was not designed. Users could not adjust the shape or size of text.
  
  
• The 525-line television set at best could display up to 22 lines of text with 40 characters for each line. Service providers wanted users to view the text like a regular television show, so there were only 35 words per screen. This, in turn, meant stories had to be very brief or the number of screens per story became unwieldy. The result was that readers didn’t get enough information electronically and bought traditional newspapers instead.
  
  
• Television resolution was often not fine enough to display images or graphics clearly.
  
  
• This poor picture quality, along with the inability of pages to display animation or sound, meant videotext and teletext didn’t have the aesthetic or emotional appeal of television, magazines, and newspapers.
  
  
• Videotext and teletext transmission speeds were abysmally slow, even by 1980s standards.
  
  
• Retrieval of information was often difficult. Users sometimes had to key-in the designated number of a file they wanted to view. Because whole language and relational search techniques were in their infancy, users located information by moving from directory to subdirectory, a cumbersome process at best.
  
  
• The videotext and teletext databases didn’t contain enough information to satisfy even minimal user demand. Gateway contained only 5,000 frames of information, Viewtron only 15,000. In a classic example of Catch-22, potential information providers didn’t want to contribute to the databases because videotext and teletext were in a trial stage, but to expand beyond the trial stage, the electronic information services needed larger databases.
  
  
• And perhaps most important, the graphic and aesthetic limitations of videotext and teletext made them unappealing environments for advertisements and, consequently, publisher never received enough advertising revenue.