Electra was a teletext service in the United States that was in operation from the early 1980s up until 1993, when it was shut down due to a lack of funding, and discontinuation of teletext-capable television sets by the only US television manufacturer offering teletext capability at the time, Zenith. It was owned, operated and maintained by Cincinatti-based Taft Broadcasting Corporation and Satellite Syndication Services (SSS), in cooperation with cable/satellite tv station Superstation WTBS (now TBS Superstation), who carried Electra's data on their VBI. Teletext is an information retrieval service provided by television broadcast companies. ... Zenith Electronics Corporation is a manufacturer of televisions in the USA. Inventor of the modern remote control and introducer of the HDTV in North America. ... This article is about the city of Ohio. ... TBS Superstation is a popular American cable TV network that shows sports and variety programming. ... The vertical blanking interval (VBI) is an interval in a television or VDU signal that temporarily suspends transmission of the signal for the electron gun to move back up to the first line of the television screen to trace the next screen field. ...
Electra was America's answer to the British Ceefax or ORACLE systems, providing news headlines, weather, entertainment/lifestyle info, and other information. Electra used the WST (World System Teletext) protocol, the same protocol used for teletext in the United Kingdom along with the rest of Europe. Electra was one of the very few Americanteletext services in operation. A few other services were offered by some large-market TV stations in the US throughout the 1980s, such as Metrotext from KTTV in Los Angeles and KeyFax from WFLD in Chicago. Ceefax (phonetic for See Facts) is the BBCs teletext information service. ... ORACLE (Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics) was a commercial teletext service broadcast on ITV and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom from 1974 to 1992. ... A satellite composite image of Europe Europe is geologically and geographically a peninsula, forming the westernmost part of Eurasia. ... Teletext is an information retrieval service provided by television broadcast companies. ... KTTV (Channel 11) is a Fox television station affiliate in the Los Angeles area. ... This article is about the largest city in California. ... WFLD is an owned & operated station of the Fox Television network, based in Chicago, Illinois. ... Chicago (officially named the City of Chicago) is the third largest city in the United States (after New York City and Los Angeles), with an official population of 2,896,016, as of the 2000 census. ...
Electra also carried another teletext service on it's higher-numbered pages, a service called Tempo. Tempo mainly carried sports (and other miscellaneous) information on its pages.
At the time of Electra's closing in 1993, it was the only existing teletext service in the USA.
Teletext was first demonstrated in the USA in 1978 by American television network CBS, which decided to try both the British Ceefax and French Antiope software for preliminary tryouts for a teletext service using station KMOX (now KMOV) in St.
Electra ran up until 1993, when it was shut down due to the prominent (and only) American TV manufacturer offering teletext features in their sets, Zenith, discontinuing such sets (more info on this in the next paragraph), a lack of funding, and lagging interest in teletext by the American consumer.
Teletext services in the USA like Electra could be received with one of these sets, but these were mostly more expensive higher-end sets offered by Zenith, posibly causing Electra (and American teletext in general) to never catch on with the public.
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