It was done. Teletext delivered news, sports results, horoscopes, closed captions, all directly to your TV in real-time. It was quite clever as a pre-internet method to deliver text content to every home.
All the people in the comments here being unaware of this makes me feel old.
It was not a thing in the places I grew up in. But when I saw it working during a European visit, it blew my mind. That was 20 years ago.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but at least here in Germany teletext is still a thing and works on all the larger channels.
Teletext is a fun art form. Too bad the graphics are only really used for tarot and phone sex ads.
Anyway, here are some of my recreations of Czech cartoon characters using the online editor at edit.tf:
I have more but I am rate limited. Imgur album
It was a thing for most of the world, I just don’t believe it really caught on in the US, it was called teletext and was really widely used.
2023: “can we turn it off?”
In Germany we say Teletext
