[6510]

I think you had 999 pages but each page could have 9999 sub pages.

The pages were send one by one so if you typed 200 you would have to wait for page 200 to cycle by. If it had 100 sub pages you would have to wait 100 times as long. I believe more important pages could be send more often or similarly the cycle would skip less important pages. Decent TV's would just store pages and sub pages until the next cycle.

I asked crappy local TV stations what a page would cost but they didn't have anything under 1500 guilders per month (comparable to $1500 today) which was an absurd amount of money for 1kb of hosting.

No wonder that, besides news, subtitles and the tv guide, the thing was entirely filled with lottery phone lines, astrology lines, sex lines and similar trash.

[IrishJourno]

Original article author here: Yes, key pages were multiple times over teletext. It's a bit of a grey area for amateur radio regs, so I didn't mention it in the article, but you could use the software with say, an license-free part 15 short wave FM transmitter, to send an entire carousel of many pages. As such the code does have an option to flag ket pages and specify how many times they should be repeated over a carousel's broadcast.

[6510]

I remembered my grand vision for teletext. All pages should be dedicated to a text based rpg using the Choose Your Own Adventure mechanic[0]

People want to fight orcs and goblins, ride dragons, cast magic missile and save the princess.

That (using teletext) one can update the plot dynamically makes for a fun creative challenge. Should probably draw a giant flow chart with the 999 states. When all pages are used you have to remove things before you can add things.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

[mrkwse]

Viewing the fee as being for a volume of storage doesn't seem the right perspective. It's $1500 to lease some %age of spectrum for some period. If true Teletext on an analogue signal and broadcast vs cable, then $1500 for 0.05% of the total non-media spectrum doesn't feel like a terrible deal.

$1500 today is probably in the region of 10s of GB, sure, but that's almost a commodity volume by comparison in terms of supply.

[6510]

The way I thought of it at the time was that they had 2 kinds of content, official stuff like news, to make the service actually useful, for which they didn't get a cent and commercial stuff which started at that unfunny amount. They had nothing in between.

For example, I could have made a page with sub-pages with the menu from various restaurants in town. It didn't occur to me that one could monopolize delivery and squeeze restaurants into handing over a large amount of money per meal. (read: cut a large amount of food) I'm not that kind of entrepreneur. I'm sure they do actually pay ƒ1500 now for a dumb listing on a food delivery website. I thought of it as more of a fun thing to have for the local tv station (that hardly anyone watched)

I was just fooling around really but my main plan at the time was classifieds. The normal formula for those at the time was to deliver the text some place and pay in cash. I had considered a paid phone number but those also cost 1500 + 50% of the call cost. A 3 minute call would work out to cost 3 bucks of which I would get ƒ1.50 and I would need 1000 per month just to pay for the phone line. Absurd prices, local (land line) calls at the time cost 10 cents each for unlimited duration and 35 guilders every 2 months.

For a TV station with less than 100 k "viewers" I don't expect many thousands of classifieds. It wouldn't even fit on the page. Say you can fit 10 of them. Say 300 one day ads per month. As a customer, I wouldn't pay ƒ5 per day. The local newspaper started at ƒ6 and the text will stay there for the entire week.

[hakfoo]

In the US there were some experiments on delivering high-volume content by broadcasting, say, a 30-second spot which flashed dozens or hundreds of images and you were supposed to record it on videotape and play it back frame-by-frame.

There was one local channel here which pointed a camera at a fishtank while idle; if you wanted a specific data package, you called a number to request it. I think the high-water mark for the concept was a few national ads where they said "we'll broadcast the entire Chevrolet catalogue at the top of the hour, have your VCR ready." The problem being, you had to run a second advertisement to get the audience ready for the first one!

[techcode]

Considering you're mentioning guilders - was this the thing shown on TV back then https://nos.nl/teletekst?

[6510]

yes, on the national channels.