GTE mainStreet

GTE mainStreet, also known as mainStreet USA, was one of the first interactive television projects.^[1]

Internet style content was available through this television service before the internet was widely accessible. mainStreet started in the mid-1980s and matured technically with rich new content from 1990 to 1998.^[2] The explosive popularity of Netscape and the World Wide Web in the late 1990s made mainStreet obsolete. The product worked via a set-top box and utilised the customer's telephone line to send signals from the TV remote to GTE's central computers, which in turn sent the programming downstream over GTE's fiber-optic cables and the local cable television provider's coax infrastructure. As such, the images appeared much more quickly than they did on a PC with a modem at the time.^[3]

See also

• QUBE