Terry,

>>>>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.
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>>>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.
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>>I can imagine. I just live by teletext, even though we can search the same info on the internet. Basically it is the first thing I watch in the morning and the last before i go to sleep.
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>>BTW, for the lurkers who want to know what teletext is, see http://teletekst.nos.nl/ , though its is dutch you'll get the idea.
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>>Walter,
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>Teletext (just been inddep. discussing it with a colleague) does my head in: You want to know, say, what's on telly in half an hour, you go to the TV guide page, select the channel (all this time waiting while the page counter gets to your required page), then when you get to it, it's showing half a screen of ads, half of TV listing, but for that morning (WHY when that's now past?). So you have to wait while it laboriously pages forward to the evening (maybe 2-3 screens onward) after a suitable pause on each.

That probably might be the case for the commercial channels.... However, my TV does have enough memory to hold up all the pages until they refresh. I can go to each page and subpage within a snap, if the page was chached already (so after switching channels, it might take a minute or so to cache all pages). Also, our three standard channels, allow you to view the TV guide of the other two, so no need to switch.

Walter,