ORACLE (teletext) ORACLE (teletext) ORACLE (from "Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics") was a commercial teletext service first broadcast on the ITV network in the mid-late 1970s and later on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, finally ending on both channels at 23:59 UTC on 31 December 1992. It was developed and launched by a consortium backed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority at about the same time as the BBC's Ceefax service. Due to the lack of available receivers, exact launch dates have been left obscure. Receivers became popular around 1980. In Britain ORACLE, ITV's teletext service, was launched as
Teletext in the USA. 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. Despite this, the system never caught on in the USA partly due to EIA-608 being deployed for captioning before Teletext was introduced and the higher cost of Teletext receivers. In the 1980s a similar system called Telidon was developed in Canada by the Department of Communications. It used a simple graphics language that would allow a more complex circuit in the TV to decode not only