Consider the following familiar-sounding statement:
"Much has been written and spoken in the past few years about delivering printed information electronically to television screens. Nearly everyone agrees that such delivery will become more widespread than it is now, but there is much less agreement on what kinds of information will be available, how it will be paid for, how it will be delivered (over the air, by telephone line, by cable, or by fiber optics), and what effects it will have on existing media, especially such printed media as newspapers and magazines" (Weaver 1983, 1).
These words sound very much like the kind of writing published in recent years about electronic newspapers. They were, however, written 12 years ago about the young technology of Videotex, probably the closest and most ominous example the modern media has of the on-line medium.
The term "videotex" is used to encompass two related technologies called videotex and teletext (Spring 1991, 40). Teletext transmits one-way information "piggyback" on a broadcast television, FM, or cable signal to a specially adapted television set (Spring 1991, 40). Videotex, like networked computers, is a two-way system that uses telephone lines, cables or fiber optics connected to a television and allows the user to interact with the information (Spring 1991, 40).
Both technologies have their origins in Great Britain where Prestel, the first videotex service, was launched by the British post office in 1979 "in a blaze of enthusiastic predictions" (Beckett 1994, 6). The system, which was expected to revolutionize the media, offered news and information as well as services such as banking and travel booking (Beckett 1994, 6). But there wasn't enough demand for Prestel and, after years of poor response, the service was abandoned in 1993 (Beckett 1994, 6).
France followed Britain's lead in 1981 with Minitel and helped to ensure its success by giving away the televisions "in a fit of socialist idealism" (Beckett 1994, 6). Its most popular aspect was an electronic telephone directory that replaced the previous inefficient system (Beckett 1994, 6). Minitel caught on fast and became the model of what a Videotex system could be (Beckett 1994, 6).
In the United States, Knight-Ridder jumped on the videotex bandwagon in 1981 with a test system called Viewtron in Coral Gables, a rich suburb of Miami (Beckett 1994, 6). After a year, Viewtron, with its $900 terminals that weren't useful for anything but Viewtron, had achieved a household penetration of 0.2 percent. Nevertheless, other systems were started up across the country in the belief that the technology would eventually catch on (Beckett 1994, 6). The commercial version of Viewtron came out in 1983, along with now-familiar predictions that the technology would have a penetration of 50 million households by 1990, causing the demise of the printed newspaper (Fidler 1995).
Two and a half years and $50 million after it started, Viewtron, known today as "the V-word," was scrapped at about the same time affordable personal computers had begun to saturate the market (Beckett 1994, 6).
About the time Viewtron was made publicly available, another service, run by the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram and called StarText, became available to personal computer owners (Alber 1993, 353). StarText, offering news, classifieds, e-mail, stock quotes and a personal travel reservations system, grew 30 percent per year for its first six years. StarText uses a flat monthly subscription fee that started at $5 and rose to $9.95, where it remained as of 1993 (Alber 1993, 353). StarText is text-only and tries to remain as inexpensive and universally accessible as possible. The service is still popular today (Alber 1993, 359).
There was a great deal of optimism surrounding videotex in its early days that sounds eerily like the information highway talk of today. Its proponents spoke of the ability of users to select only that information which interested them, get numerous and various points of view and give feedback to information sources (Weaver 1983, 15).
Access and use issues were similar to today's on-line services. Like the contemporary services, videotex was expensive and better-suited to businesses and upper-income households (Weaver 1983, 35). The medium was also considered better for "short timely news items, sports results, and short political announcements" (Weaver 1983, 29). Other criticisms included the fact that videotex is an example of technological push rather than market pull (Weaver 1983, 21) and that the screens were hard to read (Weaver 1983, 25). In short, just about everything that was said about the ill-fated videotex technology is also being said about on-line news today.
Many of those similarities are what led to the demise of videotex. According to Roger Fidler, of Boulder's Information Design Lab, videotex services failed due to their "failure to match the inflated expectations of customers, advertisers and publishers with reality" (Fidler 1995). The costs of a dedicated terminal or TV adapter, connect charges, the poor display quality and lack of standardization of different systems, all led users to abandon videotex (Spring 1991, 41). But a more important factor had to do with the emergence of the personal computer, which had a wider variety of applications than a videotex terminal. A computer can be connected to a vast amount of sources with a comparatively inexpensive modem (Spring 1991, 41). Why own a Betamax when you can rent more movies for a VCR? "It is still too early to predict the demise of the Videotex/teletext market, but it certainly seems that the trend will be toward Videotex-like services accessed from PCs rather than dedicated terminals. There is no question that information services of this type will grow increasingly popular as our population becomes more and more computer-literate" (Spring 1991, 41).