Videoway

» see videotron.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The thing to understand about Videoway is that it was not a trial. Videotron shipped it to ordinary paying subscribers across Quebec starting in the autumn of 1989, and at its height something like 180,000 households had one under the television for a few dollars a month. Every other interactive television project of that era was a pilot in a few hundred homes that got written up and quietly ended. This one was a product line with a customer service number.

The terminal did jobs that were separate boxes everywhere else. It descrambled the paid channels and decoded closed captions. It ran a teletext service carrying weather, lottery results, horoscopes and road conditions, and it held around forty games in memory, including a licensed Q*Bert alongside the chess and card titles. The interactive channel, TVI, carried programs where the viewer chose what happened next.

The famous feature was the sport. A Canadiens game could be broadcast on four simultaneous feeds, and the remote let you switch between them, so you sat at home in 1990 choosing your own camera angle on a face-off. Baseball got the same treatment. This is a feature that streaming services now announce as an innovation, and it was running on Quebec cable while the rest of the continent was still arguing about whether anybody would ever want it.

In 1990, the year all this was happening, Turkish television was still working out how to have more than one broadcaster at all. The state monopoly had just been broken by a channel beaming in from Germany, and cable arrived slowly through the decade after that. Interactive television was not late where I was, it was not a category. The first thing I ever chose an angle on was a video player in a browser window, roughly twenty years after a household in Montreal could do it with a remote.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the box did ~

The engineering trick was that almost nothing ran over a return path. Cable in 1989 was a one-way pipe, so Videoway broadcast all four camera feeds at once and let the terminal in the house decide which one to display. The interactivity was local. The network sent everything and the box did the choosing, which is why it worked reliably at scale in a period when everybody else was trying to build two-way infrastructure and failing on the cost.

The games worked the same way, held in the terminal rather than downloaded on demand, developed for the platform by a Quebec studio called Temporel. They were simple by the standards of a console sitting next to the same television, and that is beside the point. They came free with a cable subscription and they were on the family set rather than in a bedroom, so for a generation of Quebec kids the cable box was a games machine.

~ why it stayed in quebec ~

Videotron was a regional cable operator with a founder willing to spend on an idea, and the idea needed a whole market to be worth building. That combination is rare, and it was also the ceiling. The programming had to be produced specifically for the platform, and the whole apparatus only made sense across a subscriber base large enough to fund it while staying small enough for one company to control end to end. Quebec was exactly that size.

Nothing like it spread across the rest of the continent, and the reason is structural rather than technical. Everywhere else, the company selling the box was not the company making the shows, and the multi-angle hockey feed required both decisions to be taken by the same people. The lesson is not that interactive television was impossible in 1990. It is that it needed one owner holding the cable plant and the programming together, which almost nobody was.

~ the last terminals ~

Illico launched in 1999 and did everything Videoway did on digital infrastructure that also carried hundreds of channels and video on demand. The old terminals hung around for years after that because they still worked and some households had no reason to change. The service was formally discontinued on 26 April 2006, and the remaining boxes came back to the company.

What survives is mostly in the memories of people who were children in Quebec in the early nineties, which is why the surviving documentation sits on fan wikis and lost media pages rather than in a corporate archive. The multi-angle sports feed came back around 2015 as a streaming feature that gets announced as new every few years. The part nobody has rebuilt is the games in the cable box, which is a small loss with a specific shape. It was a machine the whole household shared, and it arrived with the television service instead of being bought.

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