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Ceefax Turns 30
VirtualUK writes "Ceefax, the text information service from the BBC turns 30 today (just 3 days after myself)!! For those not lucky enough to have seen what Ceefax is about, it is text information pages sent in out-of-band data space of TV transmissions in Great Britain. What started off as a subtitling project evolved into a service still used by over 20 million viewers a week even in the face of the Internet revolution. It just goes to show that for a lot of people, the best source of sport results, last minute holiday bargains and horoscopes is still just a click away on their TV remote."
This is a good example of how the BBC is on the forefront of journalistic technology compared to the majority of US news services. One can only hope that one day soon, the FoxNEWs of the US journalism "scene" will wake up and smell the coffee of pure information display in an easy and nonobtrusively readable manner.
It's called teletext here in the UK too. Ceefax is just the BBC's name for its teletext services.
All four terrestrial analogue broadcasters have teletext services and the hundreds of terrestrial/cable/satellite broadcasters have similar digital services too.
One interesting factoid about teletext is that, at one stage, over half the holidays in Britain were bought via teletext (ads on teletext, response by phone). Obviously, with the development of the Internet that's changed, but the teletext holiday market is still pretty big.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
It's actually called teletext just about everywhere. CeeFax is simply an example of a teletext service. According to Wikipedia, CeeFax (a.k.a. Teledata) was first, and was followed closely by ORACLE. Other services came later.
:-)
Personally, I find this story very interesting. I had heard about teletext from one of those old Usborne books as a kid, but I'd never actually SEEN it. I'd always assumed that it was one of those little known services that really didn't go anywhere. It seems I was wrong.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's called teletext in the UK as well. It's just the BBC service that's called Ceefax (although the BBC teletext project was called Ceefax, and the ITV one was called Oracle, which both led to the names of the services). Oracle lost it's franchise in 1993, so Ceefax is the oldest teletext service in the UK, and probably the world. Oracle
To confuse things the company who have the rights to broadcast teletext on ITV, Channel 4 and Five (the rights were sold separately from the rights for general TV broadcasting on the frequencies) are now held by a company called Teletext Ltd, or just Teletext for short.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
It runs all the time on one of my desktops - IMHO it is the very best source of concise, up-to-date information.
Here are some dumps of the current BBC front pages, courtesy of alevtd and w3m (some stuff snipped to avoid slashdot "junk" lameness filter).
Its called Teletekst here in the Netherlands and is still used quite a lot. The public broadcasting corporation even has a web gateway. Check it out here for those of you unfamiliar with the concept of teletekst:
http://teletekst.nos.nl/
So you basically see all the area in black on your TV screen... use your remote to search for the pages.
I guess they have this service on the web because a lot of people, like another poster said, like the sparse/terse way of information presentation. I frequently visit the weather (page 702) and news page (page 101) for a quick overview. Very useful.
Also used for TV program listings and stuff like that (page 201 usually).
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Don't like to be picky but there are actually Five terrestial analogue broadcasters (although I personally can't get channel 5).
Don't like to be picky either (well, sometimes I do), but BBC1 and BBC2 are both BBC channels. That's one terrestrial broadcaster providing two channels. So the four terrestrial analogue broadcasters are the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and five.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
It is also a source of grief to me that modern TV's don't cache the pages as they receive them so you always get the page you want instantly.
Up to 799 pages (BCD with 3 bits for the top number) (yes 088 is the real page that is 888) at 1K each, thats less than 1MB uncompressed!
I also remember that BBC used to distribute software over teletext which yu could pick up with your BBC Micro teletext decoder.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Indeed, when the BBC started the BBC literacy project in 1980, it was a requirement of the hardware that it would have a 'teletext' mode. This then became the BBC Micro's 'Mode 7' graphics.
#include "disclaimer.h"
In other words - It sucks! There's no 'direct access' to information.
Ceefax is great for the footy scores - if you know the page number, you just type it in, and voila - you're on the current scores for the Premiership or whatever. Took about 10 seconds.
Kind of like the latest version of Windows really - it's much newer, but it takes 10 times as long to do anything as it did 10 years ago on your 486 :-)
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
Ahhh... good old MODE 7, aka Teletext. :-)
:)
One of the things I really miss about TV since moving to the USA is the various Teletext services. I've never understood why this system didn't catch on outside of Europe (maybe there's a technical reason, I dunno).
Long before I had internet, I could spend literally hours reading Teletext pages and playing the really basic, but still entertaining games (remember Bamboozle?). We even had a Teletext reader on the old BBC Micros at my school, about 10 years before they got the JANET linkup
The closest the US has is the information pages that DirecTV and some cable providers have. However, they're nowhere near as comprehensive.
It's great for TV listings too... Long before anyone had satellite or digital cable, one could quickly load up a list of programming for the week, with info pages for all the major shows.
I've spent many a happy hour browsing Ceefax, and this website about how it all fits together. As a youth it takes a lot of effort to work out how Ceefax sends the page you ask for, but there's no two-way communication -- Page Frame Relay comes to the rescue.
Bit of trivia -- Ceefax is ocasionally known as in the UK as the Skinternet because of the relative cheapness of getting on to Ceefax as opposed to the internet.
[ Skint + Internet ]
Tell me do you always link completely separate things in bizarre twists of the Logic? or are you just stupid?
Ceefax 1974, BBS mid to late 80's, Internet 90's. One did not affect the adoption of the other. Internet actually replaced BBS, and until the mid 90's 98% of the population wouldn't be able to tell you what the Internet was never mind what the hell BBS was.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
Will have to use? Most Swedish channels that transmit teletext in the analogue network do it in the digital version too. The only difference is that it's a lot quicker in the digital version. It's the same chunky graphics, interface etc though. One example of this is SVT (I think it could be called the Swedish equivalent of BBC, http://www.svt.se).
Lots of the Teletext based quiz games used to exploit this feature in conjunction with "Fastext" (where your remote had 4 coloured buttons that jumped to related pages listed on screen).
Each question was multiple choice and you used Fastext to answer. Obviously, useful page numbers like 123 couldn't be wasted on pages that just said "Sorry, wrong answer" so Fastext was used to send people to pages like 54B.
Fastext got around the problem of people not having a "B", for instance, on their remote. More importantly, it stopped the viewer from noticing that three answers went to page 54B whilst one pointed to 54C...
Indeed. This page makes interesting reading for any BBC micro fan. The paragraph after the first table mentions the use of Mode 7 and Teletext. It also mentions the BBC micro teletext adaptor
#include "disclaimer.h"
The name isn't a coincidence - the computer was originally going to be called the Proton, but the BBC were looking for a computer for their BBC Computer Literacy Project - see here for more details.
(And in fact, teletext came first - the BBC Micro came out in the early 80s, teletext in the 70s...)
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
Unfortunately, different television sets implemented "fasttext" in different ways, and also sometimes offered other features to "cheat" in this way. One easy one I remember was on my first fasttext set where it had buttons to increment and decrement the teletext search number. It'd wrap when it rolled from 9 to A, but if it was already on A it would happily increment B, C, D etc until it reached F and rolled back to 0.
Another cool one was a TV set I had that would let you press another coloured button while the first one you pressed was still searching. If you were lucky with the transmission timings, you could press all of the buttons in turn and see which one was different to the other three which would be the right answer. Finally, last year I lived with a friend who had an old TV which was fancy for its time. It had cool features like teletext caching, bookmarks and all sorts. It would actually let you switch the fasttext display from the given names to the page numbers, making the cheating trivial. It would also let you enter full hex numbers into the bookmarks system by using increment/decrement as on the first TV I mentioned, but you couldn't enter them directly.
Of course, cheating at a teletext game wasn't really the point, it was just interesting to play around with the teletext system and Bamboozle (a game which I believe is still broadcast today on Channel 4 Teletext) was one of the few things which used un-enterable numbers.
Also interesting is that in the early days they had to limit the number of available pages so that the interval between a particular page being transmitted wasn't too high. I believe the transmission speed was increased at some point which allowed for more pages to be introduced. Also, since there's no rule that the pages must be transmitted in order, pages which must change often or oft-requested pages can be transmitted more frequently. The subtitles on "Page 888" are transmitted more frequently than other pages so that they can be updated in realtime as dialogue proceeds in the programme. I've often thought it'd be fun (although not particularly useful) to recreate something like the teletext system using multicast on the Internet.
The BBC's mode 7 was put in there in the first place with teletext in mind. ;-)
Teletext predates the BBC by some 8 years, the Beeb having launched in April '82.
Your links probably say this but oooh I looove karma.
Now I shall get redundantly modded to Hell.
OK I'll bite.
It is true that we have to pay the Televison Licence every year and it's about £110-£120 (I have not checked). But look at all we get!
7 national, commercial free radio stations giving high quality music, spoken word, and live event output (like One Big Sunday if that's your bag or BBC Proms); 6 or so digital national commercial free TV channels with some pretty good original programming (and not so good too); loads of regional TV and Radio of similar quality; BBC Online; and, er, we gave the Yanks The Office, didn't we?
Sorry, I'm getting a lump in my throat here... Let me just step outside.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
My parent's first teletext capable TV had a lovely bold font that was really readable.
The next TV had the skinny 'spectrum' style font that most screenshots you see use.
You have to remember that in the UK, PAL has around 284 vertical lines of resolution, so a 40x25 screen only had around 10 pixels per character vertically to define stuff in. I think most TV sets use a standard ROM with the 256 8x10 pixel fonts stored within.
One advantage to having teletext hardware in the TV however was that the TV itself could use them for its on-screen display functionality, e.g., to set up brightness, contrast, etc. That probably saved a chip or two inside the set.
In comparison, the modern digital text services suck. They look nicer with the smoother fonts and stuff, but they are too clunky. It must be a failure of the digital receivers which are either only decoding the video part of the MPEG2 stream, OR the data part of the stream. So when you enter 'interactive' mode, you have to wait for the box to download the world and everything. Each time.
The same fate befell Prodigy, GoNetworks, and anyone else who DARED compete with AOL. :-(
Actually:
Prodigy first bought by SBC, and then rolled into the "SBC Yahoo" service when Yahoo's MCI partnership soured.
Go was bought by Disney, and is a portal for all their owned companies (ABC, ESPN, et al.)
Besides that, Mindspring and Earthlink are one company. Not EVERYONE was bought by AOL.
And here's how the money goes
How your licence is spent
Each household's colour TV licence cost £9.67 every month in 2003/2004. On average each month, this was how the BBC spent your money:
Average monthly licence fee spend
BBC One £3.37
BBC Two £1.45
Digital television channels £0.98
Transmission and collection costs £0.98
BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, 4 and Five Live £0.99
Digital radio stations £0.08
Nations & English Regions television £0.90
Local radio £0.61
bbc.co.uk £0.31
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
This required you to dial up a (typically premium rate) phone number and then access a specific teletext page. This was your page, and you could interact with it using the digits on the telephone keypad. I played many simple games, e.g. snake, and there were even ways to do online banking using this.
If you knew how to, other people could also look at the same teletext page and see exactly what you were doing. Sky used to have a password system for some of their online games, so it used to be quite easy to figure out someone else's password by looking at it as it was typed in!
Marc
(who won a tenner by being one of the highest scores in one of the games)
IIRC, it wasn't Gemstar's VideoPlus+ system that caused that problem -- it was Programme Direct Control (PDC) signals.
VP+ was that system where a code was printed in TV listings magazines. You then entered that code into the remote of a VP+ capable VCR, and that code was translated into the channel, start and stop times for the programme to be recorded.
PDC, similar to Teletext, embedded data in an unused area of the screen. The idea was that broadcasters could signal the precise start & stop times of their shows, allowing PDC-enabled VCR's to adjust their timer-recordings appropriately.
Channel 4 was the only broadcaster to make a good attempt at PDC, and even then it was unreliable. There was a page on C4's Teletext service (p799 I think...) which let you view the PDC signal events in real-time. No idea if it's still working. Incidentally, Channel 4 were also the only broadcaster to implement PAL-Plus. The idea of PAL-Plus was to allow broadcasters to transmit shows in anamorphic widescreen, and the embedded P+ signal let a suitable TV automatically switch to the correct mode (adding vertical bars if the screen was 4:3, or leaving untouched if 16:9). All on standard analogue transmissions.
This was all a good decade or so before digital services made this sort of thing commonplace.
(who remembers playing Bamboozle on C4 teletext? Or what about Digitiser, the gaming and tech pages? Or, back in the early eighties, getting BBC Micro code from Ceefax? I gotta say, without the Beeb I wouldn't have ended up starting out in computing as early as I did)
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
I live in the UK and I've heard that too. OTOH, I spent several years without a TV set and was not harassed, mightily or otherwise. Once a year or so a letter would arrive asking me whether I had a TV set and/or licence for it. I'd reply that I had a set, that it was broken and couldn't receive broadcasts and that therefore I didn't need a licence. No real hassle.
To explain for the benefit of non-Brits: the licence is not for the set but for the ability to receive broadcasts. As my receiver was nonfunctional I didn't need the licence. I only kept the set in the house in order to screw with the brains of the bureaucrats. Eventually I got married, my wife had a fully functional TV set and I ditched the bureaucrat teaser.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate