As an American, I often feel an intense jealousy of Ceefax, one of several commercially successful teletext services in the UK and Europe.

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2024-11-24 02:00:03

As an American, I often feel an intense jealousy of Ceefax, one of several commercially successful teletext services in the UK and Europe. "Teletext" is sometimes a confusing term because of its apparent relation to telecom-industry technologies like the teletypewriter and telegram, but it refers specifically to a "broadcast text" technology usually operated over TV networks. Teletext could be considered the first form of "interactive television," a reimagining of traditional television as a more WWW-like service that allows viewers to navigate through information and retrieve content on-demand.

Despite many, many attempts, interactive television was never particularly successful in the US. Nor, I believe, did it fare well in Europe after the retirement of teletext. It was an artifact of a specific time and place; once PC ownership and internet access expanded they handily filled the niche of interactive text. That feels a little surprising, televisions being a big screen that so many consumers already had in their home, but offerings like MSN TV sucked to use compared to PCs. The technology for interacting with PC software from a couch honestly still isn't quite there [1], and it was even worse in the '90s.

Despite its general failure to launch, Interactive TV was, for a time, a big field with big ideas. For example, you've heard of MPEG-4, but what about MHEG-5? That's the Multimedia Hypermedia Expert Group's effort towards an object-oriented, television-native hypermedia environment, and it's exactly as terrible and fascinating as that description would lead you to believe. But I'm not going to talk about that today. Here's what's on my mind: what if I told you that MSN TV was Microsoft's second attempt at interactive television?

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