I saw on the ‘net today that the BBC’s CeeFax videotext service is turning 30 years old today. Unless you’ve spent time in the UK (or Europe, where the television broadcasters there have similar services), you probably aren’t familiar with CeeFax or videotext services.
In the days before the internet, there was a lot of talk about being able to get news, weather, sports, movie times, etc. through your TV. In the early 1970s, some British engineers discovered they could put pages of text on part of a station’s TV signal which could be decoded at the user’s end with the use of a special decoder box. This service would not be seen by people who didn’t have the box, nor would it interfere with any of the station’s regular programming.
Videotext services offer the user lots of information, presented in text and very rudimentary graphics (think Commodore 64), which could come in quite handy if there’s no internet-connected computer nearby. I’ve used the videotext services on the German, Swiss, and Dutch TV networks while traveling in those countries, primarily for weather information (a picture of a cloud with raindrops coming out of it is universal).
Field Communications, the company that owned WFLD-TV Channel 32 here in Chicago, started a subscription-based videotext service in mid-1981 called Keyfax, where you could rent the decoder box and have all the services I described above. The company they set up to provide this service was called Keycom Electronic Publishing.
To get people interested in Keyfax, Channel 32 used to run the service “in the clear” from midnight to 6:00 am, meaning that you could watch the service (but not choose the pages that would be displayed) on your TV without being a subscriber. They called this program “Nite-Owl,” and from what I read at the time it was very popular with insomniacs, third-shift people, and late-nighters who were just coming in.
Nite-Owl ran in 20-minute “orbits” of programming, with 20 minutes of news, sports, and weather, followed by 20 minutes of “leisure,” then back for 20 more minutes of news. The video would refresh and give a new picture every 40 seconds or so, and the audio portion was a music bed of soft-rock.
It was actually pretty cool, having a service on your TV that would run a constant rotating stream of news, weather, business, and sports. In between the “main” segments, they would run trivia quizzes and contests, and they had a “Bulls-Eye Club” that you could join. They even had a “Viewer Mail” segment.
Keyfax was shut down in early 1983. Field Communications was being dismantled, and they sold their TV stations to Metromedia. These were the days when there were over-the-air pay TV services in Chicago, each of which required its own box to be attached to your set. And on top of all this, cable television was finally arriving in Chicago and the suburbs. Put all of this together, and the consumer was faced with many options as to how their TV dollars could be spent. There just wasn’t enough interest to keep Keyfax going.
So, what began as a fairly powerful service on one part of the globe is barely a footnote here. It was pretty cool, though.