[TIGHazard]

With the new media bill officially killing Teletext, what are your memories?

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[Neil Jones]

Well Teletext effectively committed suicide by withdrawing what they agreed to provide, and Ofcom finished them off.

Hardly surprising really nobody else applied for the licence (I presume Ofcom did advertise it) and its been overtaken by the internet anyway these days.

Believe HDMI doesn't support the transfer of Teletext (as in "press text") and I dare like Sky and Virgin boxes and whatever else there is these days wouldn't relay it anyway if even it was transmitted (and supported by the cable).

[Humphrey Hacker]

I miss Teletext. It seemed simpler.

[WillPS]

Well Teletext effectively committed suicide by  withdrawing what they agreed to provide, and Ofcom finished them off.

Hardly surprising really nobody else applied for the licence (I presume Ofcom did advertise it) and its been overtaken by the internet anyway these days.

Believe HDMI doesn't support the transfer of Teletext (as in "press text") and I dare like Sky and Virgin boxes and whatever else there is these days wouldn't relay it anyway if even it was transmitted (and supported by the cable).

Sky+HD boxes certainly supported Teletext still (via SCART/RF only though), it was the only way to get subtitles to work on some channels as recently as 6 or so years ago - TV5Monde for one.

I think Sky is a bit of an outlier in the UK in supporting Teletext over DVB. The BBC even produced a reduced version of Ceefax for a while for it.

[i.h]

Many generic DVB receivers also have built in teletext decoders to work around the HDMI issue.

Would be interesting to know how Sky does it in Germany (where teletext remains popular) and Italy - isn't it the same hardware as is used in the UK

[Technologist]

Well Teletext effectively committed suicide by withdrawing what they agreed to provide, and Ofcom finished them off.
Hardly surprising really nobody else applied for the licence (I presume Ofcom did advertise it) and its been overtaken by the internet anyway these days.

It was a bit more complex than that - Teletext Ltd did not get an allocation on DTT which enabled them to duplicate/ approximate to in MHEG5 what they were doing in EN 300-706 Teletext .... and some early STB was very slow (one worked by you put a number in it waited until that page was transmitted , registered that the page was in transmission then waited until it came round again before displaying it . Hardly the slick "digital" operation!)
So as more people got DTT (and they did!) the Service was very much degraded...
That was not a good place to start from when your main advertisers - Holiday companies discovered that it was cheaper to let the viewer book their own holiday on line than talking to a call centre..... (after all well over 50% UK holidays used to be booked via Teletext).

Also TV listing were on the EPG so no need for viewers to access a text service to do that (incidentally in the UK had Ceefax/Teletext ltd/ Sky text all cross carrying all majors (and some minor) Broadcasters listings .... where elsewhere in Europe it was very much this "channel only" so the EPG was familiar (even though it was not DTT platform wide until 2002)
...... so again fewer viewers accessing the service.

I think Sky is a bit of an outlier in the UK in supporting Teletext over DVB. The BBC even produced a reduced version of Ceefax for a while for it.

Sky was not required to offer a Next generation text service .. so knew where is money lay !!!
(Although Sky's Interactive service was a good finance vehicle for funding STB)
The Ceefax Lite was to serve the cable companies in the low countries with Programme listings and a few news headlines ...... and to keep the subtitles going!
(the Sky STB subtitle rendering worked with only subtitles in the VBI..
Every Tv set did not .... so when Teletext ltd stopped ... Analogue itv Ch4 C5 although they were transmitting subtitles ...they were not decodable - OFCOM got very agitated!!! )

I miss Teletext. It seemed simpler.

In many ways it is/was nicely simple - but it could be inefficient....
The Ceefax engine putting out in the usual Magazine parallel on 13.5 Line pairs when the emitted service was on 12 line pairs - because there were filler packets .... as the BBC had the Government threat of taking VBI away if it was not used efficiently there was a lot of cleverness applied with some simple QOS to strip out the fillers and replace with displayable packets.
But by changing the numbers of VBI line per stream and which magazines were in the streams and how many page numbers you could get the right cycle times for the pages -
(something MHEG5 DSM-CC never got right)
and Teletext technology also had data services - EN 300-708 - e.g. Corals betting, London stock exchange, Cardcast (duff credit cards) all of whom needed universal instantaneous data transmission
....and of course PDC .....far better that the DVB equivalent
...and the First Open standard EPG EN 300-707 uses Teletext data !!!!

It was simple - but its been working for 50 years .... !!!!

[ASnep]

Many generic DVB receivers also have built in teletext decoders to work around the HDMI issue.

Would be interesting to know how Sky does it in Germany (where teletext remains popular) and Italy - isn't it the same hardware as is used in the UK

SkyQ In Germany is actually completely different hardware. When Sky Germany launched UHD the accompanying box was called Sky+Pro, wich (like the older German Sky+ boxes) had a buit in Teletext decoder.

Later these Sky+Pro boxes were upgraded with a modified version of the UK SkyQ software, which removed the Teletext feature (to the annoyence of many).

[Brekkie]

I still think Teletext did a much better job of translating their service across to digital - maybe not initially but certainly once Teletext on ITV / Teletext on 4 launched. It pretty much replicated the service and crucially kept page numbers, whilst BBC Text only kept the menu page numbers and then for stuff not on Ceefax had four digit numbers - something which hasn't even been changed since. There may have been some logic in not numbering every single page but it leaves the menu making very little sense over a decade on.

[Neil Jones]

I still think Teletext did a much better job of translating their service across to digital - maybe not initially but certainly once Teletext on ITV / Teletext on 4 launched. It pretty much replicated the service and crucially kept page numbers, whilst BBC Text only kept the menu page numbers and then for stuff not on Ceefax had four digit numbers - something which hasn't even been changed since. There may have been some logic in not numbering every single page but it leaves the menu making very little sense over a decade on.

Must be remembered the initial BBC Text didn't have any page numbers. They were added later. The fact they just so happened to match the Ceefax numbers for the various pages is probably not an accident.

[Rdd]

At least up until fairly recently RTE was still transmitting the WST Aertel service on Sky and it could still be picked up with an old Sky+HD STB connected via SCART. But yeah, HDMI doesn’t support it.