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Was teletext killed off in the US by the disability movements in conjunction with Sanyo?

Arran Cameron
I encountered an interesting post on TV forum about teletext in the US during the 1980s and 90s:


The CBS lobbied the FCC to make the French Antiope system the standard teletext protocol for the US but later abandoned the system in the mid 1980s in favour of NABTS. Antiope enabled TVs stopped being manufactured in 1987 and Antiope broadcasts ended in France in the early 1990s after France adopted the British teletext standard.


A competing system to both Antiope and the British teletext standard developed in Canada was NABTS (North American Broadcast Teletext Specification) that was adopted by both NBC and CBS but it failed due to the high cost of the separate decoders that were generally only sold in a small number of localities where TV companies operated NABTS services. NBC discontinued NABTS in 1985 and CBS followed a year later. Despite the lack of commercial success of NABTS in the 1980s, decoders were included in analogue TV tuner cards for PCs manufactured in the late 1990s and 2000s.


Following the failures of both Antiope and NABTS in the US, Zenith tried to create a US teletext standard in 1986 by including a teletext decoder module using the (then firmly established in many countries using PAL) British teletext standard in the Digital System 3 sets. A limited number of TV channels made use of these teletext decoders, the most prominent example was the Electra service on the cable channel WTBS, but by then the major national TV companies like NBC and CBS had given up on teletext. Rather strangely, no Japanese TV manufacturers sold any TVs with integrated teletext decoders. This could well have been a major factor why few TV companies decided to operate teletext services.


Competing with teletext for VBI lines was the National Captioning Institute which was established in 1979 several millions dollars of start-up funding from the Federal government and the support of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The technology behind closed captioning was developed in the US during the 1970s. In 1980 NBC and PBS started including closed captioning to their programmes but CBS decided to offer captioning using Antiope instead. Originally a set-top box (manufactured by Sanyo and sold through the NCI) was required to receive closed captioning as no TVs included a closed captioning decoder as standard. Sanyo determined in the late 1980s that it would be less expensive for the public to buy a TV with an integrated closed captioning decoder rather than a set-top box. The result was that Sanyo lobbied Congress, with the backing of an expert witness testimony, to pass legislation requiring all TVs to be sold with a closed captioning decoder as standard. The Television Decoder Circuitry Act became law in 1990 and gave the FCC powers to enact rules on the implementation of closed captioning decoders in TVs. The FCC mandated that all TVs with a screen size of at least 13 inches manufactured after 1 July 1993 must include a closed captioning decoder as standard.


In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act became law and required that TV programmes included subtitles for deaf people although it did not specify that closed captioning should be used rather than teletext.


Zenith decided that it would not be practical to redesign their TVs to have both a teletext decoder and a closed captioning decoder so decided to eliminate the teletext decoder from their 1993 range of TVs. This effectively ended teletext in the US in 1993 and the Electra service also shut down that year.


There are questions whether the disability movements in the US and the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare were aware of teletext and that it could be used for subtitling programmes (as it was in the UK and Europe) as an alternative to closed captioning. Between 1986 and 1993 both teletext and closed captioning existed in parallel to each other in the US. Did Zenith and teletext service providers ever respond to the lobbying by Sanyo to Congress for closed captioning decoders to be included in TVs as standard, that teletext can also provide subtitling so teletext decoders should be included as standard instead? One could argue that the fragmented nature of American TV and the failure to come up with a teletext standard before 1986 were significant factors hindering the deployment and uptake of teletext services in the US but they were not ultimately responsible for its failure (to even catch on?). Would history have been different if at least one of the major TV networks had decided to offer teletext services nationally after 1986 using the British teletext standard as used with Zenith TVs? Would history have been different if Japanese manufacturers had included integrated teletext decoders on their mid to high end models after 1986 even if initially very few TV companies offered a teletext service? Was teletext ultimately killed off in the US by the disability movements in conjunction with Sanyo who were backing closed captioning instead?
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    Arran, thanks for an interesting post. A very good resource that delves deeply into this history is: Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television by Gregory J. Downey (JHU Press, 2008; ISBN 0801887100, 9780801887109). It seems there were many factors that could have changed the course of history outside of the influence from Sanyo and NCI. Furthermore, most of these had played out prior to the 1990 Television Decoder Act, including:
    • In 1983, the FCC, favouring an open environment/deregulated approach, let market forces decide, rather than mandate a standard, to allow both Teletext like services and captioning for the deaf.

    • Competition from emergence of personal computers and local dial-up subscription services like CompuServe, without expensive long-distance toll charges, made the business case for continued investment in Teletext like information services content development much weaker for CBS, NBC and their independently owned affiliate stations in their networks, who couldn't agree who should produce Teletext like content and services, and whether advertisers would pay for them.

    • By 1990 and the passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act, the market and consumer preference had already decided that a subscription based model, accessed via a modem and a local telephone call, provided a faster, more expansive service, than via a television advertising-based model which was slower, more limited Teletext like content services. This is likely why no one lobbied too hard against such prescriptive and restrictive language in the Television Decoder Act that required "that all such apparatus be able to receive and display closed captioning which have been transmitted by way of line 21 of the vertical blanking interval and which conform to the signal and display specifications set forth in the Public Broadcasting System engineering report numbered E7709-C dated May 1980, as amended by the Telecaption II Decoder Module Performance Specification published by the National Captioning Institute, November 1985."

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    David McQuiggan:

    In 1983, the FCC, favouring an open environment/deregulated approach, let market forces decide, rather than mandate a standard, to allow both Teletext like services and captioning for the deaf.



    By 1986 WST was the only teletext standard, albeit an unofficial standard, in the US because it was the only one in use by broadcasters and the only one for teletext decoders in new TVs. Considering the success of WST in Europe and that WST teletext decoder ICs were now mass produced commodity items, then it was unlikely that the US would ever consider another teletext standard until digital TVs were developed.

    Competition from emergence of personal computers and local dial-up subscription services like CompuServe, without expensive long-distance toll charges, made the business case for continued investment in Teletext like information services content development much weaker for CBS, NBC and their independently owned affiliate stations in their networks, who couldn't agree who should produce Teletext like content and services, and whether advertisers would pay for them.

    I'm not convinced that it was as clear as this. Dial-up services were more successful in the US than they were in Britain, but they certainly weren't anywhere near as mainstream as teletext was in Britain.

    By 1990 and the passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act, the market and consumer preference had already decided that a subscription based model, accessed via a modem and a local telephone call, provided a faster, more expansive service, than via a television advertising-based model which was slower, more limited Teletext like content services. This is likely why no one lobbied too hard against such prescriptive and restrictive language in the Television Decoder Act that required "that all such apparatus be able to receive and display closed captioning which have been transmitted by way of line 21 of the vertical blanking interval and which conform to the signal and display specifications set forth in the Public Broadcasting System engineering report numbered E7709-C dated May 1980, as amended by the Telecaption II Decoder Module Performance Specification published by the National Captioning Institute, November 1985."

    Did the closed captioning community exist in parallel to the teletext community in the US, with neither paying much attention to what the other was doing?

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