In the Netherlands, the first Viewdata was introduced on the Firato in 1978. This was devised in the same year by British Telecom, which published it under the name Prestel from September 1979. Viewdata is a method of retrieving data from a database and displaying it on a computer, terminal or TV screen. This was published between 1979 and 1989 by the then PTT under the name Viditel.

Viditel was active in the Netherlands from August 7, 1980. For this purpose, one could buy a separate small terminal (which initially cost 5,000 guilders) or use a home computer such as the Philips P2000T, which was very popular for this purpose. When the first pages were to be visited, so many television cameras were active that the power in the room went out.

For requesting information, not only telephone calls were often charged (calling in in Amsterdam) but (per page) often also extra costs, in addition to the subscription that had to be taken out specially for this. Partly due to the high costs, the system never became as popular in the Netherlands as the French Minitel was in France. The latter because in France the so-called Minitel terminals were provided free of charge when a telephone line was delivered and the costs for calling were lower. In 1982 there were 5000 Viditel users in the Netherlands.

In 1986, a competitor emerged from ComNet, an initiative of Curt Roth Sr. (founder of Aster) who mainly focused on banking. Girotel, among others, arose from this.

Due to disappointing users and the time that companies needed to enter data into the databases, Viditel was succeeded in 1989 by Videotex, which had no subscription costs and which allowed companies to develop their own dial-up points. This made the market less businesslike and there was room for relaxation (chat boxes and sex).

The rise of the Internet made it completely unnecessary. Videotex Netherlands was officially stopped on January 1, 1997 and was replaced by Planet Internet.