It was done. Teletext delivered news, sports results, horoscopes, closed captions, all directly to your TV in real-time. It was quite clever as a pre-internet method to deliver text content to every home.
All the people in the comments here being unaware of this makes me feel old.
It was not a thing in the places I grew up in. But when I saw it working during a European visit, it blew my mind. That was 20 years ago.
2023: “can we turn it off?”
It was a thing for most of the world, I just don’t believe it really caught on in the US, it was called teletext and was really widely used.
I kind of miss Ceefax, the BBC’s Teletext service. The immediacy meant that headlines were often broken first on Ceefax before TV or radio, but the limitations meant there was little room for overly-verbose fluff. I remember using it in the early nineties for realtime flight arrivals at our local airport, so we knew when to set off to collect my grandparents.
I remember reading about a system used somewhere else in Europe where you would call a phone line and use your phone’s dialpad to navigate the Teletext on your TV - that sounds very clever.
we still have teletext in Ukraine even though noone really uses it. (and also we don’t have analogue tv anymore, but it’s still possible to use them somehow afaik)
there’s even an online version of the most popular one (Intertext) which has a realtime chat feature (you can text a specific number to send your own messages, kinda like discord lol)
http://intertext.com.ua/Can confirm. It was common here in Norway. My dad got most of his news updates and weather forcasts from there, as he was usually busy during the evening news broadcast.
Yes, it can indeed be done, it’s called Teletext. But by the time computers with internet showed up, people slowly but surely stopped caring about it.
At least there’s still that red button on my remote that I can press to access some spiritual successor to telete- oh wait, I don’t live in a country that has this.
So I booked a ticket to the UKIn Germany we say Teletext
It’s mostly just another advertising channel for premium phone numbers and bs horoscopes, phone sex lines or bs “surveys” where you txt an expensive number. All the content is autogenerated like weather, sports results or program preview.
Ukrainian one has a phone number you can text to post messages in a global chatroom for around 1cent per message
the chat is still up and full of bisexual men looking for partners for some reasonYeah in Germany there are sex over phone numbers on the Teletext from every single channel that is not tax sponsored.