Teletext on YouTube

Took a look on YouTube to see if there were any examples of Teletext there. Surprised to find there were quite a few. The most interesting was an example of Channel 4's daytime screening of their Teletext service, 4-Tel, from 1986:

4-Tel, 1986
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjfao5MGf3s

The above seems to be a kind of digitised comic strip story involving a chess game. Regular paper-based frames are replaced by a series of hand generated stills which rotate at regular intervals are played through to the sound track of some classical piano music giving it a relaxing, soothing feel, perhaps aiming at the early afternoon television watchers which tend to be older. Personally I think it's cheesy but a lot of things from the 90s do seem slightly outdated today. Teletext, on the other hand, seems to be still going.

In the example above, there is some use of pixel mapping to create text. Since, as default, there are only two sizes on the one font, this is necessary to render larger text with more impact.

This demonstrates a level of pixel art not seen much on the network today: the Internet has taken priority in recent times with its improved graphics and capacity for higher-resolution representations of photographs.

ORF Teletext
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-qVA3CBnN8

ORF is a German version of Teletext. In this 30-second video, the general feel of it, helped generated by a classical guitar soundtrack, is much the same though the items being screened are more information based. Having said this, there are some minimal artistic elements in the titles.

Above is an example of a logo and title used by ORF. Here, pixel rendering is used once more for the larger text, but it seems as if there are two fonts available: a serif and a sans serif one also. The logo is very minimalist and is most likely a primitively digitised version of the network's main professional logo. However it does its job of getting across a certain amount of brand identity.

http://teletext.orf.at/ - Examples of ORF teletext online.

And finally, a parody of Teletext courtesy of Naked News:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-lAm0fCEXs.

This pokes fun at the format, parodying the non-interactive scheduled broadcasts of the service portraying a situation that would never happen in real life. However, there is apparently some decidedly 'dodgy' pixel content in the Swedish version of teletext, so there is an element of truth in this... er, the presenter's head blowing up, that is.