Finnish teletext 📺

I noticed that skyjake (geminispace's most prolific dev?) put up some pages from Finnish TV's teletext service.

YLE Teksti-TV

He said it's a Finnish language service, so I wasn't expecting to understand any of it, but...

...there are pages in English

So now I can enjoy a headline-only news service about Finland. I didn't know that I wanted that, but I enjoyed reading it. They have weather too, but only for Finland (it's cold). And when I need to know flight details to/from Finland, they have that too.

Also available: Swedish

I think that some people in Finland speak Swedish, so this makes sense. Looks like there's news, TV and radio info, and things I can't even guess at.

I liked teletext, and there used to be a lots of it back when TV was analogue. Now the UK only has a minimal thing on BBC which mirrors (some of) their web content. It used to be available on all channels (there were only 4) and some of it was fun.

Web page about Bamboozle, the Channel 4 quiz page

Back when the internet wasn't really a thing, it was pretty cool that you could read stuff on your TV. Instead of watching the news at fixed times, you could get some headlines whenever you wanted. Seems odd now to be excited about that, especially because it was *very* slow.

It seems that VHS tapes of TV shows include the teletext data that was being broadcast. You can extract it and reconstruct the pages. I don't want to try this, but I'm entertained by the idea that it's possible.

#teletext

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