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.
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."
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.
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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