Electra (teletext) VBI (WTBS was in turn owned by Turner Broadcasting System, which would purchase the Hanna-Barbera animation studio, and most shows from sister company Ruby-Spears, from Taft successor Great American Broadcasting in 1991; Turner is now part of Time Warner). 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 World System Teletext (WST) protocol, the same protocol used by Ceefax and ORACLE, as well as by other teletext services in the rest of the European continent. Electra was one of the very few American teletext services in
Teletext to four lines a frame. While the basic teletext format has remained unchanged in more than 30 years, a number of improvements and additions have been made. A closely related service is the Video Program System (VPS), introduced in Germany in 1985. Like teletext, this signal is also broadcast in the vertical blanking interval. It consists only of 32 bits of data, primarily the date and time for which the broadcast of the currently running TV programme was originally scheduled. Video recorders can use this information (instead of a simple timer) in order to automatically record a scheduled programme, even