Tag Archives: teletext

Happy 45th birthday to the oldest teletext service, SVT Text in Sweden. BBC was first, but they stopped doing teletext in 2012. According to recent polls, SVT Text is used daily by 15% of the Swedish population.

Browse our teletext archives

Teletext decoder test on national Czech TV, Česká Televize, 2024. One in ten Czechs accessed ČT1 teletext in 2009, according to this report. ČT announced a new teletext service in 2010 and launched “HD teletext” (HbbTV) the following year, while still keeping the oldschool one.

Time Teletext was a US teletext service, 1981-1983. Compared to common British teletext, Time offered smooth vector graphics with the NAPLPS-standard (common in American videotex). Time used satellite and cabe cable, so it had more pages and a better frame than other teletext. That paved the way for teletext games sucha as Dire Straits and Outer Space Zoo. The games turned out to be more popular than the news, which was not what Time was hoping for with their $25,000,000+ investment…

Teletext animations, presumably by Ian Irving. In case it would disappear from Youtube, it’s also stored here.

Max Headroom teletext by Horsenburger, 2023.

Doom running in teletext, playable with the remote control. By lukneu. GitHub. h/t: Zden, René

Oracle teletext, via

Nokia ringtones teletext ads from 2001, recovered by the teletext archeologist.

In 1995 some countries started to broadcast a new British teletext protocol called level 2.5. Likely inspired by the French Antiope standard, it had more colours (4016 instead of 7) and redefinable characters. Few people ever saw it, because if your TV didn’t support it you would just see the classic level 1.

But now ZXGuesser has extracted level 2.5 teletext data from VHS-tapes and figured out how to display it. So the first image shows level 2.5 and the second shows level 1, both taken from this tweet.