ExtraVision

~ the last words ~

Every analog television picture had lines at the top that the screen never showed you. Teletext put data in them. CBS had been testing the idea since 1979 at KMOX-TV in St. Louis using the French Antiope system, ran a second trial in 1981 on KNXT in Los Angeles alongside PBS station KCET, and launched the real service as ExtraVision in April 1983 on WBTV in Charlotte. It went nationwide the following year.

What arrived in those hidden lines was a magazine. There were pages of news and weather, and there was subtitling for CBS programming, in the same role British viewers knew from page 888. Local affiliates could overwrite parts of it with their own schedules and community announcements, and WGBH in Boston, already the leading American producer of captioning, supplied material aimed at deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.

In 1988 I was four years old in Turkey, so the only honest thing to say about ExtraVision from here is that I met the idea through the other standard. Teletext did reach Turkish living rooms, but it came in on the European system, and by the time I was old enough to press the button the decoder was already inside the television set. That single difference is the entire story of why one service survived into the 2000s and the other lasted five years.

~ the record ~

~ the decoder problem ~

ExtraVision ran on NABTS, the North American Broadcast Teletext Specification, which was technically richer than the British World System Teletext and considerably more demanding to decode. A viewer who wanted it had to buy a separate box. The FCC, having declined to mandate teletext in television sets at all, also declined to pick between NABTS and the British system, which left manufacturers with no reason to integrate either one and left broadcasters transmitting to an audience that could not receive them.

The cutbacks started in May 1986 with layoffs, after which news production was handed to AP/TMS Media Services, a joint venture of the Associated Press and the Tribune Company. Most affiliates never bought the computer equipment needed to insert local pages, so the local customization that was supposed to be the selling point ran on three stations in the whole country. WBTV in Charlotte and WIVB-TV in Buffalo did it. So did KSL-TV in Salt Lake City, which had been experimenting with teletext on its own since 1978 and kept going into the early 1990s.

~ the captioning fight ~

The ugly part of this story is that CBS was betting so heavily on teletext subtitling that it would not carry line 21 closed captioning, the system its rivals used and the only one that worked on an ordinary television set. Reports at the time had CBS wanting captions stripped even from commercials in its programming.

The National Association of the Deaf went at CBS in public. There were pickets at the network's studios and at affiliate stations around the country, and in Grand Rapids one child stood outside with a sign reading "Please caption for my Mom and Dad". Phil Bravin, who chaired the NAD's new TV Access Committee, had already talked NBC back into captioning after it dropped the service in August 1982. CBS was harder. After one useless meeting with affiliate relations head Tony Malara, Bravin told him he would see him on the streets of America. CBS gave way in March 1984 and promised three hours of captioned programming for that fall.

~ 1988 ~

NBC had already abandoned its own teletext service in 1985. CBS held on three more years before shutting ExtraVision down in 1988, leaving the United States with no national teletext at all while Britain and most of Europe kept theirs running for another two decades. The technology was not the failure. The distribution of the decoder was.

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