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The Sad Story of Videotex

• What went wrong?
  
• Some facts about videotex
  
• The biggest videotex/teletext ventures
  

In the early 1980s, several U.S. newspaper companies and other publishing concerns sank tens of millions of dollars into trials and tests of a technology called videotex, which delivered printed information on a TV set. Just imagine sitting 10 or 12 feet from your television and scrolling through some really large, really low-resolution text -- the kind of text made of big square pixels. Fun, right?

The story is that the companies that ran these tests did a lot of expensive market research, asking people who had never seen a computer, or anything like videotex, what they would like in terms of information that would be delivered as electronic text. The people answered, and the horrible videotex systems were built to deliver what the people said they wanted.

(I think some of these questions were on the order of "Would you like to get the latest news whenever you want it?" People said yes. "Would you like to have updates of news in the middle of the day?" People said yes. "Would you like weather information?" Yes. "Would you like sports scores?" Yes, yes, yes.)

One researcher (David H. Weaver) quipped that rather than resembling an electronic newspaper, a videotex system was more like "printed radio."

What did the people do? They tried it, they hated it, and then they refused to use it. In one trial, they used it pretty regularly until they were asked to pay something on the order of $600 for a box that attached to their TV set, and then they said no, thanks, you can take the box back. Every trial failed miserably. And the executives and market researchers who had authorized the spending of vast sums of money on these lousy systems said, "We asked the people what they wanted, and we gave them exactly what they said they wanted, and then they didn't want it." Uh-uh, fellas. Bad explanation. Look again.

When you give people something that is hard to use or annoying or inadequate, they won't use it.

Several distinctions are commonly made between videotex and teletext, a similar technology for TV-delivered information:

• Teletext came via a broadcast signal, while videotex came via hard wire, either phone line or TV cable.

• Teletext thus had less capacity -- a few hundred "pages" or screens could be available at any time.

• Videotex was two-way and teletext one-way.

• Videotex had graphics (if you could call them that) and teletext didn't (maybe that's why teletext ends with a "T" and videotex doesn't).

In 1988, the Videotex Industry Association (now the Interactive Services Association) said that there were 40 fee-charging consumer videotex sytems in operation and that 1.1 percent of U.S. households were using some form of videotex.

• Viewtron, a Knight-Ridder project launched in 1983; it boasted 2,200 subscribers in southern Florida after an investment of $36 million (eventually this project switched to a personal computer platform, after a reported $60 million was put into the videotex effort)

• Covidea, a joint venture of A T & T, Time Inc., Bank of America and Chemical Bank; for a few months in 1986 it carried New York Pulse, a service of The New York Times

• Gateway, from Times Mirror, killed in 1986 after an estimated $20 million investment

• Trintex, which evolved into the current Prodigy service, reportedly had spent more than $50 million in 1986 and still had not launched a product (Prodigy was finally rolled out in 1988)

• Keyfax, launched in 1984, provided local news, weather and sports to 800 people; it was on the skids by mid-1985; companies involved included Centel (a phone company) and Field Communications, which owned the Chicago Sun-Times

• A system from Time Inc., launched in 1982 in San Diego and Orlando, Fla., shut down after one year and an investment of more than $25 million; it reportedly offered 5,000 "pages" of information

• Britain:
  Ceefax (BBC); Oracle (independent TV); Prestel (British Telecom and the post office) -- all three started up in the 1970s; Ceefax and Oracle are reportedly still operating

• Canada:
  Telidon; ALEX (Bell Canada)

• France:
  Minitel, still up and running (in-home terminals were provided free by the state-owned telephone company) -- see U.S. News & World Report, May 7, 1990, for a history of Minitel