Broadcast Teletext used to be a common TV service since the 1970s, especially in Europe. Now it’s mostly extinct. BBC stopped their Teletext in 2012.
However, in Finland Teletext is alive an kicking. Many TV channels offer Teletext news, weather and more. Here’s Teletext on my TV, showing service from the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE.
I’m receiving my TV service over the internet with a Wi-Fi HDMI decoder box made by Arris Inc. This fairly modern digibox supports Teletext natively and even caches the pages for fast service.
Teletext generally has 23 lines with 40 characters per line. There are 8 colors and a limited set a drawing characters. Charset picture from unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025… (”Proposal to add characters from legacy computers and teletext to Unicode”).
But the real kicker hit me when I browsed random pages on YLE Teletext. On page 820, there was an announcement about a current art exhibition: ”Teletext Art 2020”: teletextart.com
#TART2020
The exhibition is live for another month. Best enjoyed on your own TV set (assuming you are in Finland)!
National Teletext services are still available in Italy, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, all Nordic countries etc. Full list is on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t…
The coolest way to access Teletext is with an Apple Watch: apps.apple.com/fi/app/teletex… - app by @PasiSalenius, photo by @pajp.
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