The first Finnish teletext service started life on 7 October 1981. It was initially aimed at the hard of hearing, but quickly acquired a broader audience. Now it's used by nearly a million people every day, and is still going strong.
Back in 1981 the service had 80 pages and was used by some 100,000 people. By the 2000s that had grown to more than two million, and even now around 1.5 million people use teletext weekly.
Nowadays the service has around 1,600 pages, including weather, sport, news, financial figures, lottery results, recipes and travel information.
Sports results and statistics are an important part of the service in Finland. The first contract for a continuous connection was signed with the ice hockey league in 1988, and nowadays live scores are available from many different sports.
Since 1996 the service has also been available on the internet, gaining teletext a whole new audience and visibility to Finns across the globe.
A direct and easily navigable source of information
The service is currently run by the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle's employee Matti Rämö, who says it's a labour of love.
He says there are several good reasons why the service has endured in Finland.
"Teletext is incredibly handy. It has had the same stable structure for many years, which makes it easy to find news items quickly," he says.
He says the service's ability to pinpoint and synthesize the flood of information is also a plus.
"The service provides a limited amount of data. It is a great filter for the tsunami of information we are bombarded with on a daily basis. It is also incredibly up-to-date, especially in its play-by-play coverage of sports events, which are increasing broadcast on pay TV channels."
Rämö says teletext services are very popular in Central Europe, but Yle's pages still tend to provide a much wider selection of content.
Yle's teletext service features news items in English 24 hours a day on pages 190-194.
