Comment by sverhagen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sverhagen | Hacker News Reader

Being from the Netherlands originally, I know _their_ "Teletekst", not as much the BBC one. I couldn't possibly imagine it being of much use anymore. Similar to how the article started in past tense (before continuing in present tense):

> Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext.

I read this article from four days ago (link below, it's in Dutch) about how the Dutch broadcasting had recently made a significant investment to upgrade the old system, which was running on a local Windows 2003 machine/server, to a cloud-based solution that integrates with their other content-management system(s). It surprised me how many people still use this system. From the article: "the service still reaches a few million people per week through TV screens, and another 800,000 daily users via its app". (For reference, population of the Netherlands is 18 million.)

https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...

Teletext is great. It's highly curated and you can read all the pages in the morning in a few minutes. It's part of my coffee and morning routine.

Also mostly ad free, free of clickbait, concise, and really really fast. It's RSS before RSS.

Yeah, mostly... it depended on the station. Commercial stations in the Netherlands, to the extent they even bothered with Teletext, did at times do ads.

Yeah, same here in Spain. Just the same short news in any channel, neither left/right opinions from the journalists nor lengthy and unneeded details; next to it, some services mimicking newspaper sections.

I worked on those systems and the joke was the TT100 really was the homepage of the Netherlands.

It all ran on a couple of SGI Challenge-S servers, these were basically re-packaged Indy's.

If you've been on the net that long you may also remember the original nu.nl which was utterly barebones and blistering fast. No ads, no eye candy, no opinions or comments, just the AP feed.

> Being from the Netherlands originally, I know _their_ "Teletekst", not as much the BBC one. I couldn't possibly imagine it being of much use anymore.

I know quite a lot of people in NL, some under 50, who prefer teletext to other forms of news and use it all the time.

In Germany and Portugal it is still used in some channels, for example for subtitles, although not much.

I got to say, having using Teletext again when writing that blog post, I do actually prefer consuming my news that way. That surprised me.

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