Genesis Storytime

~ the obit ~

In 1983 I was exactly the age this channel was built for and on entirely the wrong side of the planet for it. Turkish television that year was the state broadcaster and nothing else, cable came here at the end of the decade, and a 24-hour channel whose whole function was to show a picture book to a preschooler would have been unimaginable as a use of a scarce channel. Genesis Storytime is a product I can describe precisely and cannot remember at all.

Two Canadian engineers named Art Doerksen and Greg Stetski built it in Winnipeg, and Satellite Syndicated Systems began carrying it to American cable headends in November 1983. It ran around the clock as an electronic storybook, showing one page of a children's book on the screen at a time, drawing the artwork in slowly because the technology of the moment could not do it any faster. Eric Hill's Spot the Dog was on it. So were Bible stories, which made up about a tenth of the catalog.

The books were redrawn in NAPLPS, the graphics standard where a picture travels as a set of drawing instructions rather than as pixels, because of how the channel physically reached you. There was no set-top box in anyone's house. The cable company installed a Telidon decoder at its own headend, a data stream fed the decoder, and the decoder's video output went out on a regular channel that any television could tune. From the couch it looked like a normal channel. Underneath it was a videotex terminal the size of a cable plant, drawing for a whole city at once.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the silent channel ~

It transmitted no audio whatsoever. That was a design decision, not a limitation: the reading was supposed to be done by a parent sitting next to the child, at a stated pace of about 90 words a minute, with stories running ten to fifteen minutes each. A red heart in a black box blinked in the corner when the next page was coming, which is the entire user interface.

Cable operators did not always respect the silence. Some of them fed whatever audio source they had lying around over the top, a local radio station or a satellite music feed, so in some towns the storybook came with unrelated music playing under it. Being Canadian did not help it at home either. CRTC rules kept it off Canadian cable almost entirely, and a Winnipeg public-access channel ran it as a half-hour slot that cut off mid-story when the slot ended. The channel was made in Canada and watched in the United States.

~ why almost none of it survives ~

By 1990 the company was struggling and a Winnipeg real estate owner named Helmut Sass bought it. Doerksen was not part of what came next. It carried on as Story Vision Network and stopped operating in 1997, with no notice that anyone has found since.

What is left is close to nothing. Nobody sets a VCR to record a silent channel that draws a page and waits, so the footage that survives is a handful of clips, and the reconstruction has to be done from newspaper archives and the founders' own memory. Stetski put the peak reach at two to three million cable homes, which if true means several million American households had this channel available and essentially none of them recorded it. A product can be that widely distributed and still leave less trace than a website that ran for six months.

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