Genesis Storytime

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Genesis Storytime was a cable TV channel founded in 1983 in Canada by Art Doerksen and Greg Stetski and distributed to several cable TV systems throughout the USA.

It was a 24-hour channel that functioned as a "electronic storybook" of sorts, that featured several digitally redrawn children's books, such as Eric Hill's Spot the Dog series, and Christian children's stories as well. It displayed each page of a story on-screen, and would draw each page's graphics somewhat slowly, due to the technology of the time. There was no sound transmitted with the channel, since Genesis Storytime was meant to be read out loud by a parent reading a story displayed to a child.

The books were redrawn digitally because of the way Genesis Storytime was distributed to the cable TV headends. It relied on decoders originally used for the Canadian Telidon videotex system installed at the headend, with the graphical data for the stories to be displayed fed to the Telidon decoders via a datastream delivered via satellite to the headend from Satellite Syndicated Systems, a company that distributed data for teletext and other services. The data was then decoded and displayed as graphics by the decoder, with the decoder's video output being fed to a cable TV channel. This meant that Genesis Storytime was distributed on a cable TV system as a regular channel viewable on any regular TV set, without any set-top decoder required.

Genesis Storytime's logo was a red heart in a black box, which would blink in the corner of the screen whenever the next page was about to come up.

Although being Canadian in origin, Genesis Storytime was mainly distributed in the USA because of bureaucracy from the CRTC hindering the distribution of Genesis Storytime in Canada. VSP, a public-access channel in Winnipeg, did air the channel as a 30-minute program on the schedule, ending the program even if a story was not completed.