Yle’s teletext service turned 45 on Wednesday 7 October. Finland’s public broadcaster launched the service, known in Finnish as Teksti-TV, on 7 October 1981, long before the internet reached most homes, and it still delivers news, sports results and weather to viewers today.
Teletext was first designed for people with hearing difficulties, but it quickly became a source of news and information for millions of viewers. It works on any television set that can display it, and viewers need neither a modem nor a subscription. That made it open to anyone with a suitable set, at no extra cost. Pages are built from text and simple, blocky graphics. Every section and subsection has its own page number, which viewers type in on the remote control to call up the page they want.
Finland was not the first country to adopt the technology. The BBC began offering teletext in the UK in 1974, seven years before Yle’s launch. Yle says teletext changed the way information spread well before the internet became common, giving households access to up-to-date text on the same screen they used to watch television programmes. By the time the internet arrived in Finnish homes, teletext had already given viewers years of text news on demand, delivered through an ordinary television set.
The service has kept going through decades of change in how people get their news. Yle’s teletext is still available on television sets and on the internet, and it continues to publish current news, sports scores, weather reports and other information. A small amount of Yle News content in English also runs on teletext, starting on page 190, which gives English-speaking residents in Finland a way to follow the main stories through the service without going online.
Yle marked the anniversary by looking back at how the service began and linking to its coverage from 2016, when teletext reached 35. Ten years on from that milestone, the service still runs on the same basic idea that viewers met in 1981: numbered pages of text, called up with a remote control, available to anyone with a compatible television and no extra equipment. That simple design has kept the service running for 45 years, and Yle continues to update it with news, sport and weather alongside its other news services.
