The Web Killed the Teletext Star — Or Did It?

The internet has been the go-to communication technology that most of the planet has relied on everyday for a couple decades now, so it is easy to forget about the before time. There is now even an entire generation that has grown up with the internet and knows no other world. But of course mass communication is not new, even if it was more unidirectional in the past. Radio and television signals, for instance, have been filling up the airwaves for over a hundred years.

Even still, the jump from television to the internet was massive — but it did not exactly happen in one fell swoop as many suppose. There were intermediate steps, like teletext, for example, although this technology was primarily deployed in Europe. It enabled televisions to serve as terminals that could display any arbitrary information in the form of text and simple graphics. There were even interactive teletext systems that allowed users to chart their own course and select the teletext pages they wanted to display.

Sounds familiar, right? While it was quite web-like, when the real thing came along it promptly killed off teletext — at least for all practical purposes. Given that the web killed teletext, it might be strange to hear that someone brought back teletext to display web content, but hey, hackers gonna hack. That hacker is Mastodon user Enfys, who connected a teletext system with the Fediverse to display social media posts.

The build is straightforward. It is centered around a Raspberry Pi, which outputs video to a television via a composite signal. A Python script regularly grabs the most recent toots from a Mastodon feed, which it then parses to remove HTML tags and otherwise get in shape for teletext’s limitations. Finally, a teletext signal injector converts the teletext data into a broadcast signal for display on any television that supports teletext.

At present, there is no support for user input or images. Maybe someone else will add that functionality into a future revision of the system. If that person happens to be you, we sure would like to see Hackster News on the big screen in teletext format (hint, hint)!

There is perhaps no practical use case for such a hack, but it could be used to build a pretty cool display piece, or to take a stroll down memory lane while keeping up on what’s happening in the present day.