Videotex - Uptake - North America

North America

Interest in the UK trials did not go unnoticed in North America. In Canada the Department of Communications started a lengthy development program in the late 1970s that led to a graphical "second generation" service known as Telidon. Telidon was able to deliver service using the vertical blanking interval of a TV signal or completely by telephone using a Bell 202 style (split baud rate 150/1200) modem. The TV signal was used in a similar fashion to Ceefax, but used more of the available signal (due to differences in the signals between North America and Europe) for a data rate about 1200-bit/s. Some TV signal systems used a low-speed modem on the phone line for menu operation. The resulting system was rolled out in several test studies, all of which were failures.

The use of the 202 model modem, rather than one compatible with the existing DATAPAC dial-up points such as the Bell 212, created severe limitations, as it made use of the nation-wide X.25 packet network essentially out-of-bounds for Telidon-based services. There were also many widely held misperceptions concerning the graphics resolution and colour resolution that slowed business acceptance. Byte magazine once described it as "low resolution", when the coding system was, in fact, capable of 224 resolution in 8-byte mode. There was also a pronounced emphasis in government and Telco circles on "hardware decoding" even after very capable PC-based software decoders became readily available. This emphasis on special single-purpose hardware was yet another impediment to the widespread adoption of the system.

One of the earliest experiments with marketing videotex to consumers in the U.S. was by Radio Shack, which sold a consumer videotex terminal, essentially a single-purpose predecessor to the TRS-80 Color Computer, in outlets across the country. Sales were anemic. Radio Shack later sold a videotex software and hardware package for the Color Computer.

In an attempt to capitalize on the European experience, a number of US-based media firms started their own videotex systems in the early 1980s. Among them were Knight-Ridder, the Los Angeles Times, and Field Enterprises in Chicago, which launched Keyfax. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram partnered with Radio Shack to launch StarText. (Radio Shack is headquartered in Fort Worth).

Unlike the UK, however, the FCC refused to set a single technical standard, so each provider could choose what it wished. Some selected Telidon (now standardized as NAPLPS) but the majority decided to use slight-modified versions of the Prestel hardware. StarText used proprietary software developed at the Star-Telegram. Rolled out across the country from 1982 to 1984, all of the services quickly died and none, except StarText, remained after another two years. StarText remained in operation until the late 1990s, when it was moved to the web.

The primary problem was that the systems were simply too slow, operating on 300 baud modems connected to large minicomputers. After waiting several seconds for the data to be sent, users then had to scroll up and down to view the articles. Searching and indexing was not provided, so users often had to download long lists of titles before they could download the article itself. Furthermore, most of the same information was available in easy-to-use TV format on the air, or in general reference books at the local library, and didn't tie up your phone line. Unlike the Ceefax system where the signal was available for free in every TV, many U.S. systems cost hundreds of dollars to install, plus monthly fees of $30 or more.

In fact, the most successful online services of the period were not videotex services at all. Despite the promises that videotex would appeal to the mass market, the videotex services were comfortably out-distanced by Dow Jones News/Retrieval (begun in 1973), CompuServe and (somewhat further behind) The Source, both begun in 1979. None were videotex services, nor did they use the fixed frame-by-frame videotex model for content. Instead all three used search functions and text interfaces to deliver files that were for the most part plain ASCII. Other ASCII-based services that became popular included Delphi (launched in 1983) and GEnie (launched in 1985).

Nevertheless, NAPLPS-based services were developed by several other joint partnerships between 1983 and 1987. These included:

• Viewtron, a joint venture of Knight-Ridder and AT&T
• Gateway, A service in Southern California by a joint venture of Times Mirror and InfoMart of Canada
• Keyfax, A service in Chicago by Field Enterprises and Centel
• Covidea, based in New York, set up by AT&T and Chemical Bank, with Time Inc. and Bank of America
• Grassroots Canada by InfoMart, Toronto
• Teleguide, A kiosk-based service in Toronto by InfoMart and in San Francisco by The Chronicle

One of the early videotex providers, Trintex, a joint venture of AT&T-CBS completed a moderately successful trial of videotex use in the homes of Ridgewood, New Jersey. Trintex was merged with another joint venture that added Citibank to the AT&T-CBS partnership. Shortly later Sears bought into the partnership that in circa 1985 began to offer a service called Prodigy, which used NAPLPS to send information to its users, right up until it turned into an Internet service provider in the late 1990s. Because of its relatively late debut, Prodigy was able to skip the intermediate step of persuading American consumers to attach proprietary boxes to their televisions; it was among the earliest proponents of computer-based videotex.

NAPLPS-based systems (Teleguide) were also used for an interactive Mall directory system in various locations including, the Worlds largest indoor mall, West Edmonton Mall (1985) and the Toronto Eaton Center. It was also used for an interactive multipoint audio-graphic educational teleconferencing system (1987) that predated today's shared interactive whiteboard systems such as those used by Blackboard and Desire2Learn.