Hacker News Reader

IIUC the short version of the story is that PAL regions got Teletext while NTSC regions ended up with NTSC closed captioning instead?

Seems so. Teletext also supported subtitles (as we called it in Britain), by selecting Teletext page 888.

Last I checked, 888 still works on satellite, and most digital TV.

Nothing there, but a page 100 telling you that there's no teletext, but page 888 still has subtitles on it.