Nowadays if you want to interact with a TV programme,
you pick up the phone or you text, and you vote.
And if you want a lot of information you go on the web.
But it wasn't always so, before the web got mainstream,
what you would do is you would send a stamped addressed envelope
if you wanted a big pack of information.
This means, for anyone born after, say, about 2000,
you would take an envelope,
you would address it to yourself.
you would put a stamp on it,
you would put it in another envelope,
and you would post that envelope off to the TV company.
And a couple of weeks later they would get it,
open it,
put their information in the envelope you'd written to yourself,
send it back to you,
and then finally a month later you would actually have some information from the TV company.
Now, in the early 90s, before the web came along,
someone did have an idea:
a couple of British programs on ITV...
Yo, Yo, Bad Influence. Check it out!
Mc Crane, kick it one time.
I'm sorry!
-- experimented, with something called a datablast.
Home video recorders were now a thing.
So, over the credits of their shows,
right at the end,
they would put information in each frame over the credits.
So that home viewers could record the whole thing,
and then pause through at their leisure.
Which was a good idea in theory,
in practice it was a bad idea because the web came along,
and it was a bad idea because home video recorders aren't nearly good enough
to manage that: they stutter,
they create artifacts,
they have all sorts of problems.
But who knows? If the web hadn't come along, maybe,
maybe, even now we'd have a datablast at the end of each of our TV shows.
And that is something you might have known
[Closed captions by MM. Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]