Teletext timeline

A timeline of events in teletext's history, sourced from this blog, Wikipedia and this.

1960s - Post Office researches 'Viewdata', a system connected via telephones.
1972 - The name 'Teledata' (Transmission of Alphanumeric Data via television) patented.
1974 - After development, Teletext goes live with 30 pages.
1976 - Teletext upgrades service. Palette of colours increased to 8 and coloured backgrounds now enabled.
1977 - First TV sets with built-in teletext encoders produced.
1980 - 'Pages from Ceefax' first broadcast.
1981 - Teletext upgraded to level 2, providing improved graphics. No British broadcasters adopt it.
Mid 1980s - Virtually every European TV set has built-in teletext encoding.
1990 - BBC finishes Telesoftware, its version of teletext for the BBC Micro home PC. The news service provided by ITN ends as ORACLE is shut down.
1996 - Ceefax relaunches in response to the popularity of ITV's Teletext service.
2000 - Digital teletext goes live. Level 2.5 (Hitext) introduced, providing enhanced text and graphics services. No British broadcaster adopts it.
2001 - Teletext broadcasts news of September 11th attacks. It proves a reliable service as pages of major news websites crash, overloaded with visitors. 5 text, channel 5's resident teletext service, closes.
2005 - BBC's Nightscreen service ends.
2008 - First analogue receivers that transmit teletext switched off. 1.133 Billion users of the Internet. Over 500 teletext services available online.
2012 - Ceefax, the world's first teletext service, completely phased out with the last of the analogue receivers switched off.

Power to the pixel!

I decided to pay homage to the traditional teletext design in my project summary, which I am currently working on. This will take the form of a Flash embedded HTML page in the style of a teletext page, as demonstrated below. The skins and designs are all but complete - now all I need is the actual content. I will work on my 300-word summary tomorrow and refine some of the details in the design - page number and date etc.

I will upload it here over the weekend.




I am also going to incorporate elements of this layout into the blog's design so expect an overhaul soon.

Teletext free service guide

I spotted a note on ITV Teletext itself: an offer of a free guide. I sent a request email to them asking for one but the message failed to send, leading me to think that the service has been discontinued. I will look to follow this up, maybe writing to the address though I am not hopeful of getting a reply.

On a more positive note, I did find a guide from 1995:


Source, and a higher res version - mb21

Bring back teletext?

On a day when 5 Live ran a news story on the 'bring back Wispa chocolate bars' campaign, I set out to look for similar campaigns for teletext. Surely a phase of the technology will be lost when the analogue switch off comes.

The search proved somewhat fruitless. Maybe this could be a gap in the market - for my project I could create a kind of campaign website, for example with the name 'TRUMP' (Teletext Revival Unified Members Project) to jointly celebrate the life of teletext as well as attempting to gain recognition for the 'death of teletext'.

I explored this idea a bit more in my notebook, so be on the lookout for that...

Bring Back Wispa!

Teletext comedy

A piece by comedian Mark Wooton. It's alright.


Possibly the inspiration for the Wootton vid above (it contains the same joke), an Alexei Sayle presented piece.

Teletext/Ceefax stories

In Praise of Ceefax - Guardian Unlimited

The clunking letters and block graphics are not cutting-edge, but Ceefax retains loyal fans. It was devised by the BBC in the 1970s to provide subtitles for the hard of hearing, using the "spare lines" that sit at the top of normal TV pictures to transmit the text. But from 1974, when it went live, Ceefax did more than subtitles - putting "the world at your fingertips" in the form of easy-to-browse pages of news, sport and information. Teletext technology was eventually copied not only by Ceefax's ITV rival Oracle but by broadcasters right across Europe. Mass appeal, though, did not come quickly - not least because the early decoders were costly. Only when, in 1980, the Beeb started filling gaps in the TV schedules with a set menu of Ceefax pages did the nation get the bug. Before long the full a la carte version was being enjoyed by millions, and the future looked bright. Recent years, however, have been less kind, and Ceefax's condition is now looking terminal. The slow death by red button continued this week, when Auntie's scalpel was applied to the specialist film, music and games pages, which were cut down and merged. Teletext seems dated not because the chance to see facts on screen is no longer valued, but because we have found new ways to do it. Like the French Minitel system, also now withering on the vine, Ceefax prefigured the internet - paving the way for a technology that would eventually overtake it, and ungratefully consign it to the past.

Laurie Sanchez and Roy Essandoh
Guardian Unlimited
Wikipedia entry

The story of a professional footballer that responded to an advert on Teletext for players during an injury crisis. Essandoh was the only one to respond but promptly scored the goal that knocked Premier League side Leicester City out of the FA Cup.

Goes to show the extent to which advertising could reach the public's wider perception, used prior to the rise in popularity of the Internet. One could say that this would have been less likely to happen on the Internet because of the limited space on the Teletext 'server' leading to more chance of people seeing the request and thus getting a response. On the other hand, the Internet would reach a wider audience. In this case, the advert only applied to the UK due to the short timespan available, so advertising on the net wouldn't have been a massively greater advantage.

Teletext then... but now?

The Death of Teletext.

When the BBC and ITV engineers developed teletext and launched it in 1974 they had produced an almost perfect product. It could be generated quite cheaply using a handful of computers, journalists and writers and cost next to nothing to add to the existing television transmissions.

It had been 10 years since the introduction of BBC-2, 7 years since the first appearance of regular colour and 5 years since its introduction to BBC-1 and ITV. TV set manufacturers and retailers, having grown used to innovation in the TV market, were ready for another initiative and got behind teletext, as did the TV companies.
...
Once you had teletext you then discovered another useful bonus. The quality of the journalism was, in general, excellent. With each page consisting of just a couple of dozen short lines (around 900 characters) news stories had to be reported clearly and succinctly. There was no room for journalese or hype. This all came as a blessed relief from the rambling column-inches of newsprint and the seemingly endless speculations of the television news bulletins.
...
That Digital Text doesn’t rely on page numbers for navigation is a further nail in teletext’s coffin. How can programme makers refer viewers to Ceefax page 673 when it doesn’t exist on the digital equivalent? It’s far easier just to give out a website address.
Yet how much easier it would be for TV viewers just to press three or four buttons on their remote and get a screenful of information in seconds. Not every TV viewer has a computer or easy access to one, let alone a broadband 24/7 connection.

So teletext is dying, but come the inquest it will be seen, all too late, that it did not die of natural causes, and it will be much missed.

Source: Techmark