rainwarrior wrote: ↑Wed Jun 29, 2022 5:47 pm
Well, not as teletext. It was just a regular video channel displaying the output of a teletext machine, so I'm not sure that it really counts. Just they usually had pleasant "elevator music" kinda stuff to go along with it, from what I remember.
Sorry for continuing the tangent, but this is one of those really random/useless things I was interested in when I was younger.
Those are usually called "character generators", and the ones on my local cable network in the 90s were by Texscan MSI. It was the most interesting because they didn't have any concept of offline editing; when it was time to update the pages, you would watch an operator type them out in real-time on the channel.
They were most common on local public broadcast channels during times when there's otherwise no programming. At least the ones I've seen were like bulletin boards with ads and programming information related to the channel, or things like community events, but they always looked like a lo-fi text-mode screen that, at most, had PETSCII or ATASCII-styled graphics made out of graphical building blocks like squares, triangles, shapes, etc. A lot of times, they'd also be able to receive standard weather data from the national weather service, and I think they'd also be used to provide the Emergency Broadcast System or Emergency Alert System screen which would interrupt the upstream broadcast, when those systems needed to be used.
If you've ever seen the Prevue channel, you've seen another kind of these character generator-style channels, but these were powered by actual Amigas (and sometimes Atari STs) rather than specialized hardware. If you've ever watched the Weather channel, you've seen some iteration of the Weatherstar.
But yeah, the most important thing to note is, this was the literal A/V broadcast from the station itself, with the visual component being the output of the character generator, and the audio component usually being some fm radio station (usually classical or office-friendly soft rock).
That was the closest thing we had in the US too. I don't think Teletext was common here, although all TVs seemed to support it. If you wanted interactive news, you needed a computer with a modem and a service to dial into, like AOL or Prodigy. A significantly larger barrier than just simply owning a TV set.