Millions of Brits Lose Ceefax News Service

judgecorp writes "Millions of Britons have lost access to Ceefax, the real time information service that has piggy-backed on blank lines of the analogue TV signal since the 1970s. Analogue TV is being switched off, and the low-res news service looks to be going with it. From the article: '“Although we won’t be saying our proper goodbyes to Ceefax until later in the year when switchover is complete across the country, I wanted to send a note of reassurance and a reminder: our digital text service, available via the red button to people who use cable, satellite or Freeview, provides national, local and international news, plus sport, weather and much else besides,” said Steve Hermann, editor of the BBC News website.'"

Comments

..and the actual link is:

[Bongoots]

The title and summary seem to suggest that the system as a whole has had a failure of some kind, though it's nothing of the likes. It's just the analogue > digital switchover means that people will "lose" access to it, however the BBC provides digital services anyway.

Steve Hermann's post on his blog can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2012/04/from_ceefax_to_digital_text.html

Re:..and the actual link is:

[pe1chl]

What all you Britons should know is that there is no technical reason why you don't get Ceefax after the digital switchover.
The digital system has support for TXT and in many other countries, including the Netherlands, the TXT service has remained in
place after digital switchover, which was completed years ago here.
There must be some political or financial reason why your BBC is dropping Ceefax. It has nothing to do with the digital switchover
as it is.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[TheRaven64]

I was very slightly too young for it, but when the BBC Micro was introduced they used to broadcast source code on a few of the Ceefax pages overnight. The idea was that schools could retrieve them using the teletext decoder and use them in lessons the next day.

I do remember when I was young enjoying the jokes and puzzles on Ceefax. Remote controls had a 'reveal' button and you could hide some parts of a page until this button was pressed, so pages contained jokes with the punchlines hidden and puzzles with the solutions hidden. Some film and book review pages also used this to hide spoilers.

It was generally the easiest way to get a TV schedule, especially once the newer TVs came in that did caching for pages (each of the pages would have its content updated very few seconds to scroll through things that were longer than a single page of text - newer TVs would record these and let you page through them without waiting for the next page to be broadcast). My mother still uses it to check the weather forecast.

I won't miss Ceefax - I've not used it for about a decade - but it was a very impressive technology for its time.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[Dogtanian]

It was generally the easiest way to get a TV schedule, especially once the newer TVs came in that did caching for pages (each of the pages would have its content updated very few seconds to scroll through things that were longer than a single page of text - newer TVs would record these and let you page through them without waiting for the next page to be broadcast).

Such caching makes a massive difference, but it's worth remembering that it's a luxury that wasn't- and couldn't have been- possible in Teletext's heyday. The early sets could only hold the page that was being displayed, and if you wanted to change the page (or wait for the next page in a set of (e.g.) 4 to load) you had to wait for it to be transmitted again, which could be around 30s. (IIRC some later sets cached a few pages, but it was still limited).

The experience of Teletext I remember from the older sets was that of having to *wait*. Don't get me wrong- it was amazing for its time (it actually came out in the mid-70s, before even the Atari VCS)- but it still had its limitations.

I got a new TV in mid-2010 and I was very impressed by the speed of the Teletext- it was obviously caching the pages, and the performance was massively better than the waits I remembered from before. This made a huge difference in usability, but as I said wouldn't have been possible in Teletext's heyday.

The reason is simple- a single page (40 x 24 characters) would take just under 1 KB to store, and back in the late 70s / early 80s even just a few extra kilobytes (1 KB for every page you wanted to cache) would have massively increased the cost (e.g. even the Vic 20 computer only had 3.5K or whatever, the unexpanded ZX81 came with 1KB and the 16KB "ram pack" was £30, around £80 in today's money).

By mid-2010, even the few *megabytes* that would be needed to cache every page on all five main channels would add negligible cost to the electronics, so there was probably no reason not to. But that amount of memory would have cost ludicrous money (tens of thousands of pounds) even in the early 80s, and probably an order of magnitude more when Teletext first hit in the mid-70s.

Of course, six weeks after I got that set the analogue signal (and old-style Teletext) was switched off with it in my area, so it was kind of moot. :-/

That said, I did remember feeling that Teletext's time had been and gone.

And yes, this story is in the British news *now* because up-its-own-arse-oh-so-important London is being switched off. They're not the last area to switch over, and they're *far* from the first.

London bias

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn - this happened ages ago for the rest of the country, but as usual nothing is said until it affects London ...

Re:London bias

[Nursie]

The greater London area, those that commute in or are centred around there, makes up somewhere closer to a quarter of the population, maybe more. Most of the money in the UK is made in the capital and surrounding areas.

The UK is London-centric. Not just the media.

I don't live there any more (ex-pat) nor will I when I move back to the UK later this year, but it's a bit of an unavoidable thing with Britain.

Re:London bias

[TheMathemagician]

Yes you're right. In fact if you just consider England, not Britain, then 1/3 of the population lives in London or the South-East. This isn't a good thing - it leads to ridiculous imbalances in employment and property prices - but it's the way it is. And population density aside, London has a much higher concentration of newsmaking entities (eg. Parliament, the City (financial district), many cultural/arts organisations). I understand the frustration people living in, say, Manchester or Birmingham feel about the London-centric news but the fact is that very little happens in your cities which is of national significance.

digital teletext is possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to be a normal teletext system like vidoetext in Germany which as opposed to ceefax survived the switch to digital.

Re:The earliest "digital" mass service

[Nursie]

Eh?

It was too interactive, did you never press the 'reveal' button to see the answers to a quiz?

They haven't lost it

[DrXym]

DVB-T / DVB-S boxes support MHEG-5 multimedia content and both the BBC and ITV have digital equivalents to Ceefax / Teletext. MHEG-5 is a declarative layout language that can combine video, graphics, text and other elements. It's interactive enough for simple games and for navigation. It can also host program streams as part of the page and even tune to different program streams within a transport. The BBC usually puts this to good effect e.g. for Wimbledon they set up different live streams for different matches and you could switch between them interactively. I expect that London 2012 Olympics will see them build out something even bigger so you can flip between events, see scores etc.

The disadvantage of MHEG-5 is it's still a bit shit as a language and many DVB-T / DVB-S boxes are so underpowered that it takes ages for the page to render properly. Additionally pages are also delivered up carousel style so you might have to wait a while for the page you're after to be sent over the signal. Ceefax was carousel style too (cycling through numbers from 100 to 999) but the content was so small that most modern TVs were able to cache everything as it passed through making it quite fast.