WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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Nowadays if you want to interact with a TV programme,

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you pick up the phone or you text, and you vote.

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And if you want a lot of information you go on the web.

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But it wasn't always so, before the web got mainstream,

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what you would do is you would send a stamped addressed envelope

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if you wanted a big pack of information.

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This means, for anyone born after, say, about 2000,

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you would take an envelope,

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you would address it to yourself.

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you would put a stamp on it,

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you would put it in another envelope,

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and you would post that envelope off to the TV company.

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And a couple of weeks later they would get it,

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open it,

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put their information in the envelope you'd written to yourself,

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send it back to you,

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and then finally a month later you would actually have some information from the TV company.

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Now, in the early 90s, before the web came along,

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someone did have an idea:

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a couple of British programs on ITV...

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Yo, Yo, Bad Influence. Check it out!

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Mc Crane, kick it one time.

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I'm sorry!

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-- experimented, with something called a datablast.

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Home video recorders were now a thing.

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So, over the credits of their shows,

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right at the end,

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they would put information in each frame over the credits.

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So that home viewers could record the whole thing,

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and then pause through at their leisure.

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Which was a good idea in theory,

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in practice it was a bad idea because the web came along,

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and it was a bad idea because home video recorders aren't nearly good enough

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to manage that: they stutter,

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they create artifacts,

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they have all sorts of problems.

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But who knows? If the web hadn't come along, maybe,

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maybe, even now we'd have a datablast at the end of each of our TV shows.

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And that is something you might have known

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[Closed captions by MM.
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