Minitel


The Minitel was a videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and was the world's most successful online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was invented in Cesson-Sévigné, near Rennes in Brittany, France.
The service was rolled out experimentally on July 15, 1980 in Saint-Malo, France, and from autumn 1980 in other areas, and introduced commercially throughout France in 1982 by the PTT. From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the Internet.
In February 2009, France Télécom indicated the Minitel network still had 10 million monthly connections. France Télécom retired the service on 30 June 2012.

Name

Officially TELETEL, the name Minitel is abbreviated from the French title of Médium interactif par numérisation d'information téléphonique.

Business model

In 1978, Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones, the French PTT organisation, began designing the Minitel network. By distributing terminals that could access a nationwide electronic directory of telephone and address information, it hoped to increase use of the country's 23 million phone lines, and reduce the costs of printing printed phone books and employing directory assistance personnel. Millions of terminals were given for free to telephone subscribers. The telephone company emphasized ease of use; one observer wrote that "the Minitel terminal requires slightly more training than a toaster to operate". By offering a popular service on simple, free equipment, Minitel achieved high market penetration and avoided the chicken and the egg problem that prevented widespread adoption of such a system in the United States. In exchange for the terminal, Minitel owners would only be given the yellow pages. The white pages were accessible for free on Minitel, and they could be searched much faster than flipping through a paper directory. According to the PTT, during the first eight years of nationwide operation 8 billion francs was spent on purchasing terminals, a profit of 3,5 billion francs was made after deduction of payments passed on to information providers such as newspapers, and an average of 500 million francs annually was saved by printing fewer phone books.
A trial with just 55 residential and business telephone customers using experimental terminals began in Saint-Malo on July 15, 1980, two days after July 13 presentation by Minitel to President Giscard. This expanded to 2,500 customers in other regions in autumn 1980. Starting in May 1981, 4,000 experimental terminals with a different design were distributed in Ille-et-Vilaine, and commercial service using Minitel terminals began in 1982. By early 1986 1.4 million terminals were connected to Minitel, with plans to distribute another million by the end of the year. To reduce opposition from newspapers worried about competition from an electronic network, they were allowed to establish the first consumer services on Minitel. Libération offered 24-hour online news, such as results from events at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles that occurred overnight in France. Providers advertised their own services in their own publications, which helped market the overall Minitel network. Others founded newspapers solely to create Minitel services.
By 1988 three million terminals were installed, with 100,000 new units installed monthly. The telephone directory received 23 million calls monthly, with 40,000 updates daily. About 6,000 other services were available, with 250 added monthly. France Télécom estimated that almost 9 million terminals—including web-enabled personal computers —had access to the network at the end of 1999, and that it was used by 25 million people.
Developed by 10,000 companies, in 1996, almost 26,000 different services were available.
The telephone company only provided the white pages, otherwise building infrastructure for others to provide services. Minitel allowed access to various categories:
The development of Minitel spawned the creation of many start-up companies in a manner similar to the later dot-com bubble of World Wide Web-related companies. Similarly, many of those small companies floundered because of an overcrowded market or bad business practices.
By 1985 games and electronic messaging were 42% of Minitel traffic, and messaging was 17% of traffic in 1988. Messageries roses were unexpectedly very popular, embarrassing government officials who preferred to discuss growing business usage of messaging. Widespread street advertising marketed services such as "3615 Sextel", "Jane", "kiss", "3615 penthouse", and "men". They and other pornographic sites were also criticized for their possible access by minors. The government chose not to enact coercive measures, however, stating that the regulation of the online activities of children was up to parents, not the government. The government did, however, levy a tax on pornographic online services.

Finances

Payment methods
Users first subscribed to individual services, but traffic grew quickly after the telephone company offered a "kiosk" model. Minitel and voice charges appeared combined on the monthly telephone bill, with no breakout of fees. Service providers received two thirds of the $10 an hour that customers typically paid as of 1988. As the telephone company handled bill collection, and users who did not pay bills lost telephone service, the customer acquisition cost for service providers was low. The single bill encouraged impulse shopping, in which users intending to use one service found and used others while browsing. As users' identities and services were anonymous, Minitel use was high at work where companies paid for telephone service.
In 1985 France Télécom earned 620 million francs from Minitel. 2,000 private companies earned 289 million francs during the year; Libération earned 2.5 million francs from the service in September. In the late 1990s, Minitel connections were stable at 100 million a month plus 150 million online directory inquiries, in spite of growing use of the World Wide Web.
In 1998, Minitel generated €832 million of revenue, of which €521 million was channelled by France Télécom to service providers.
Minitel sales in the late 1990s accounted for almost 15% of sales at La Redoute and 3 Suisses, France's biggest mail order companies. In 2005, the most popular Minitel application was Teleroute, the online real-time freight exchange, which accounted for nearly 8% of Minitel usage.
In December 1985 Minitel users made more than 22 million calls, up 400% in one year. In 1994 they made 1,913 million Minitel calls, used the system for 110 million hours, and spent 6.6 billion francs. In 2005, there were 351 million calls for 18.5 million hours of connection, generating €206 million of revenue, of which €145 million were redistributed to 2,000 service providers. There were still six million terminals owned by France Télécom, which had been left with their users in order to avoid recycling problems. The main uses were banking and financial services, which benefit from Minitel's security features, and access to professional databases. France Télécom mentions, as an example of usage, that 12 million updates to personal "carte vitale" health-care cards were made through Minitel.
In 2007, revenue was well over $100 million.
In 2010, €30 million in revenues with 85% of those revenues going to service providers.

Phonebook

The most popular service of the Minitel was the "Annuaire Electronique"; in 1985 about half of the calls on the network were to it. In May of that year a white pages directory for all 24 million telephone subscribers nationwide became available. It was accessible through the phone number 11; on 18 October 1996, the access to the phone directory changed to 3611. Companies could add up to 3 lines of complementary information and a "prehistoric" website. Ads to the Minitel phone directory were sold by ODA, today Solocal / Pages Jaunes Groupe in Sèvres France. In 1991, the "Minitel Website" for the Paris Sony Stores contained already over 100 pages. Today the 3611 Minitel Directory is replaced by the online white or yellow pages.
On 11 February 2009, France Télécom and PagesJaunes announced that they were to cancel plans to end the Minitel service in March 2009. Its directory assistance service was still being accessed over a million times a month. This was before France Télécom retired the service on 30 June 2012, on account of operational cost and fewer customers due to lack of interest.

Technology

Minitel used computer terminals consisting of a text-only monochrome screen, a keyboard and a modem, packaged into a single tabletop unit. Minitel terminals could display rudimentary graphics using a set of predefined block graphics characters. Color units were later available for a fee, but remained seldom-used. Aftermarket printers were available.
Minitel used the existing Transpac network, but its popularity caused problems for the network's commercial users. After a severe disruption in June 1985, France Télécom separated business traffic from Télétel, dedicated to the Minitel service. When connecting, the Minitel's integrated modem generally dialed a short code number connecting to a PAVI from the subscriber's analog telephone line. The PAVI in turn connected digitally via Transpac to the destination servers of the appropriate company or administration.
In France the most common dial number was "3615", while "3617" was used by more expensive services. Minitel services names were often prefixed with this number to identify them as such. Billboard ads at the time often consisted of nothing more than an image, a company name, and a "3615" number; the fact that a Minitel service was being advertised was then clear by implication, similarly to the use of ".com" for later web services.
Minitel used a half-duplex asymmetric data transmission via its modem. It downlinked at 1200 bit/s and uplinked at 75 bit/s. This allowed fast downloads, for the time. The system, which came to be known as "1275" was more correctly known as V.23. This system had been developed for general-purpose data communications, but was most commonly used for Minitel and equivalent services around the world.
Technically, Minitel refers to the terminals, while the network is known as Télétel.
Minitel terminals use the AZERTY keyboard most commonly used in France.

Minitel and the Internet

The extent to which Minitel enhanced or hindered the development of the Internet in France is widely debated. On the one hand, it included more than a thousand services, some of which predicted common applications on the modern Internet. For example, in 1986, French university students coordinated a national strike using Minitel, demonstrating an early use of digital communication devices for participatory technopolitical ends. Alternatively, the French government's attachment to the natively developed Minitel may have slowed the adoption of the Internet in France; in the 1990s there was a peak of nine million terminals and there were still 810,000 terminals in the country in 2012. In the short term, some resources at France Telecom were dedicated to the development of Minitel that might have otherwise been focused on Internet development. However, France Telecom's focus on Minitel had little or no long-term effect on adoption or development of internet- and web-based companies in France; France ranks roughly equal to the US and Germany in the current penetration of high-speed internet in households.

Minitel in other countries