>One thing that is very common up here and never really saw that in NA, is Teletext. It is a special button on your remote that shows you a pages of text (ussually from 100 - 900, with subpages) in which you can see the news anytime a day. You don't have to wait for the news to get by, you just read it like a newspaper and press the pages of interest. Most of the times it is used for diaplying news, sports, broadcast schedule, and other info. It has been in service up here since the early 80-ties.

It was one of my greatest disappointments in TV here - I saw teletext in action in Europe and it was great. I assumed it'd be even better in the US, but it simply doesn't exist here. I've found some history on the web, and it seems the corporations involved just wouldn't bother to come up with a standard, and after a few half-hearted attempts just shoved the whole thing out of existence.