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:

[mindwhip]

The "Dear Ceefax" article on the BBC news site gives a more human perspective... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17745100

I'm sad in some ways part of my childhood is going with it. I have many childhood memories of the kids pages, bad jokes, looking up when my favorite TV show was on and *having my name on TV!* on my birthday.

But the world has moved on, the Ceefax that is/was available today is a shadow of its former self.

I'm going now before I get too far down memory lane that I end up late for work...

Re:..and the actual link is:

[arkhan_jg]

And of course, it's only come up as news because London has just done its analogue switchoff so the digital channel transmitters can be upped to their full broadcast power.

For almost everyone in the rest of the country, we went through the digital switchover quite some time ago; years in many cases. And of course, ceefax went with it back then. My own switchover happened in may 2009 - I barely noticed, as I'd already been on freeview (digital broadcast) for several years before that.

To be honest, I haven't looked at ceefax in many years, so I won't miss it. The 'net has long since superseded it for me as a source of news, weather, info etc.

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:

[JasterBobaMereel]

We do get it on the BBC, there is a "Red button" text service with all the same information as was provided by Ceefax ....

Re:..and the actual link is:

[clive_p]

One very useful thing that the new digital text service doesn't have is the accurate time. Old analogue teletext had a display of hours minutes and seconds. New one has only hours and minutes, and because of decoding delays etc. even the minutes don't change right on the 0 seconds point. I have to find another way to check my watch.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[digitig]

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.

And including the UK. The digital text service is far more flexible and powerful than Ceefax (and ITVs TELETEXT), and the BBC has been taking advantage of that, so the digital text service is not the same as Ceefax.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[digitig]

Yes, and there also still is page 888, isn't it?

It clearly shows that you are being fed shit. There is no such thing as "Ceefax has to go because analogue tv ends". It is a decision made for other reasons.

The sort of stuff that used to be on Ceefax and isn't on the digital text service is now on the BBC website, except that there it's far more extensive and interactive. Ceefax is simply obsolete; it's no longer a sensible way of delivering those services.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[Malc]

I knew an Aussie living in Edinburgh in 1995 who "watched" the Ashes on Ceefax. I can't remember why he didn't have the radio on... maybe he didn't want to hear pomme commentators :) Ceefax was replaced by the internet for me, listening along with the radio (I hate you Rupert Murdoch for putting our national sport on pay tv; give it back!)

Re:..and the actual link is:

[der_joachim]

...our national sport...

What sport would that be? Binge drinking?

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.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[arth1]

The sort of stuff that used to be on Ceefax and isn't on the digital text service is now on the BBC website, except that there it's far more extensive and interactive.

Part of the charm of Ceefax was that it didn't have to be interactive - you could lie on the sofa, read a book, and glance over and see that the page had updated.
In text actually big enough to be read from the sofa at an angle. You could also use it for multi-language subtitles, or commentary, because the background image could be the TV picture.

Ceefax is simply obsolete; it's no longer a sensible way of delivering those services.

Same with text messaging compared to e-mail, and I thought text messaging would go away when I got my first e-mail sending phone in the mid-to-late 90s.
When something is popular, it doesn't matter much whether it's sensible or not. Ceefax lost popularity for other reasons, like too infrequent updating and bad support in TV sets. (And this is true for digital text TV too - a typical mid 90s set had better support than a new one)
BBC is killing it off because the viewers are going-going-gone.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[Inda]

I wasn't too young. My grandparents had one of those new style colour TVs and it was the reason I liked visiting them. When we got a colour TV years later, it was able to cache 10 pages and it had the four-colour fast navigate function!

I also remember some nerdy tech programmes spewing Ceefax/Teletext pages after the credits. The idea was to record the end, on one of those fancy VeeCeeArrs, and use the frame forward function to view each page; it was one page per frame and didn't really work.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[AmiMoJo]

Not the same, it only carries a small fraction. In particular the Dear Ceefax letters page used to provide me with some daily amusement and despair in equal measure.

Re:..and the actual link is:

[majesticmerc]

Some people really do have convoluted methods for looking at their wrist!

Re:..and the actual link is:

[makomk]

I think Fasttext - a feature that offered 4 colour-coded links at the bottom of the page to other pages that were pre-cached - was fairly widespread in Teletext's heyday. It was certainly widely available well before ordinary non-academic individuals could get home internet access.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I've had enough with all this pro-London bias on Slashdot. How about some US news for a change?

Re:London bias

[91degrees]

British media has a very London centric bias even though only about 10% of the population lives there

Re:London bias

[Theophany]

10% of the population live within 1500 square kilometres. Statistics are meaningless without context.

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.

Re:London bias

[Malc]

What? There's another country outside London? Is there anything worth seeing there?

Re:London bias

[Hognoxious]

The submitter probably thought it was something to do with censorship.

Re:London bias

[tehcyder]

Yeah, I've had enough with all this pro-London bias on Slashdot. How about some US news for a change?

What, London's not in the US?

Re:London bias

[tehcyder]

The submitter probably thought it was something to do with censorship.

"And so, with the brutal government closure of Ceefax, another glimmer of freedom in the darkness of British oppression fades away, and the UK moves inexorably towards Orwell's 1984. The question is, if the Limeys had the right to bear arms, would the Socialist government of David Cameronski dare to push their totalitarian surveillance vision so far? What do slashdotters think?"

Re:London bias

[gsslay]

You don't understand. Everyone in the UK either lives in London, or wishes they did, or is terribly fascinated by everything that happens there. That's because it's an paradise of exciting people and streets paved with gold.

Isn't London also having some kind of sporting event this summer? Why don't we ever hear more about that?

Re:London bias

[Dogtanian]

It's even worse in Scotland. A significant proportion of the allegedly "(UK) national" news just doesn't apply to us (*), but we get fed it anyway (but little news that applies specifically to us), and they might acknowledge that it only applies to England (or "England and Wales", though even that is less common since the Welsh Assembly came into being).

Granted, I accept that Scotland is far smaller in terms of population than England and that there's always going to be an imbalance, but it doesn't change the fact that much of the UK news is in fact English news. (News of (English) "nation"-wide education/policing/legal/NHS issues are still relevant to even a sheep farmer in Cumbria in a way that they'll never be to most Scottish viewers).

And then you get English people whining that Scotland, Wales, etc. get "special treatment" with their own news- blind to the fact that such things only stand out because the mainstream "UK" media *is* "English by default".

In fact, the situation is that Scotland gets the UK 6 o'clock news- including much that is irrelevant to us- followed by Scotland-wide (non-local) news that fills in the gaps to some extent. The English get the same 6 o'clock news- except that it's mostly relevant to them, so they don't *need* an England-specific bulletin- followed by half an hour of true local news (which Scotland doesn't get). But Scotland is getting "special" treatment and the better deal because it has its own news programme apparently. *cough*

(*) Scotland has a different legal system, a different education system, the Scottish NHS is entirely separate to the English one and policing is generally not affected by policy in England. This has increased since the Scottish Parliament came into existence, but has always been the case to some extent.

Re:London bias

[couchslug]

"What, London's not in the US?"

It's been a province of the US since the Blair administration. (runs)

The earliest "digital" mass service

[Animats]

I'm amazed Ceefax was still up. It wasn't even interactive, but it was "digital". There were other systems from that era, such as Prestel (UK, a flop), Minitel (France, a big success), and NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax), still used by some gambling terminals that need to send graphics over slow dedicated lines).

None of the pre-PC era stuff ever caught on in the US. France Telecom deployed dial-up Minitel service in the US, but it was used by few Americans. QUBE, a cable TV based system, was deployed in Columbus, OH. But that was about it until the PC era.

Re:The earliest "digital" mass service

[dredwerker]

I'm amazed Ceefax was still up. It wasn't even interactive, but it was "digital". There were other systems from that era, such as Prestel (UK, a flop), Minitel (France, a big success), and NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax), still used by some gambling terminals that need to send graphics over slow dedicated lines).

None of the pre-PC era stuff ever caught on in the US. France Telecom deployed dial-up Minitel service in the US, but it was used by few Americans. QUBE, a cable TV based system, was deployed in Columbus, OH. But that was about it until the PC era.

Minitel was a big success as far as I remember as people were given minitel terminals.

From wikipedia:

"Millions of terminals were handed out free to telephone subscribers, resulting in a high penetration rate among businesses and the public. In exchange for the terminal, the possessors of Minitel would not be given free "white page" printed directories (alphabetical list of residents and firms), but only the yellow pages (classified commercial listings, with advertisements); the white pages were accessible for free on Minitel, and they could be searched by a reasonably intelligent search engine; much faster than flipping through a paper directory."

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?

Re:The earliest "digital" mass service

[Anonymous Coward]

A pal from school had a stereo tv in the early 80's - despite no stereo broadcasts!
It also had a thermal printer that could print out ceefax pages...

He also had an Atari 2600 - According to my mum he had no sister, but I did - apparently this made me better off...

Unfortunately the replacement service is far worse

[MROD]

The most unfortunate part of the whole affair is that the "more advanced" digital service which is replacing the old teletext system is actually less useful and feels slower than what it replaces.

The old system may have been text only (except for some block colour "graphics") and take a while for each page to be transmitted but it was clear and easy to read. Also, the art of providing content in the limited text space available had become an art and hence the content itself was good.

The new system which replaces it take an age to start up (up to a minute) as opposed to the almost instant teletext system and because it only uses the right-hand third of the screen to display in (most of the time) has less space for information. If you add to this the fact that the only reasonable way to navigate to pages is via a deep menu system of pages (each page taking up to 30 seconds to load), rather than being able to memorise a three digit number for the page, it becomes too painful to actually use at all.

Character-based art

[TwentyCharsIsNotEnou]

What I'll really miss is the character-based graphics - it was a nostalgic reminder of when drawing something on a computer required serious planning and optimisations!

Cheap holidays

[pilybaby]

Where am I supposed to go now if I want to find cheap flights abroard!?!?

Re:Cheap holidays

[dredwerker]

Where am I supposed to go now if I want to find cheap flights abroard!?!?

:)

I am still amazed that people look at this nonsense waiting for it to change page. Its like Luddite heaven.

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.

More Nostalgia

[csrster]

Joke all you like, but when ceefax started up it was the first time in our lives we had had access to up-to-the-minute news and other information on demand. We still have it here in Denmark although it's been a long while since I used it for anything other than subtitles.

Here is a better link

[Chrisq]

FAQ Teletext has some good pictures showing the replacement.

Re:Unfortunately the replacement service is far wo

[gazbo]

An example of the block graphics: German Teletext porn!

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.

Re:Unfortunately the replacement service is far wo

[pe1chl]

That is the HBBTV system.

Re:Unfortunately the replacement service is far wo

[cardpuncher]

Indeed, and it is slated to be included in the next generation of the Freesat (UK free-to-air satellite) specs, along with MHEG for backwards compatibility.

Re:Unfortunately the replacement service is far wo

[rklrkl]

When I got my first "digital teletext" TV set years ago, I was appalled at how slow it was to load pages up compared to the fairly fast analogue teletext. Of course, later analogue teletext sets had "tricks" like large page caches that would save almost every page that was transmitted (including sub-pages) so it would feel near-instant, but even ones without a cache were quite fast and you could see the page cycling counter progress so you knew roughly when it would turn up.

One neat trick analogue teletext pages had was a "overlay page number on top-right of live TV screen if the page changes", so you could put it on the main news or sports pages, go back to your live TV feed and if a new article broke, you'd be flagged of a page update and one button press got you straight to the index page you'd left it on. Sadly, it was ruined by sub-pages which changed every 30 secs, so I had to give up on that :-(

Having had 2 digital teletext sets with equally slow navigation/display of pages, I was despairing at how rotten the new "replacement" service for analogue teletext was. However, I picked up a Technika Smartbox 8320HD from Tesco (company who make it are in administration - shows you how popular it was!) and it *flies* through every single page - literally instant navigation, which is presumably with a clever cache system. It now actually makes digital teletext a bit more bearable, but there's still snags with BBC's digital teletext:

* It seems to only be on selected digital BBC SD channels. It's not on channel 301 ("red button") and not on their two HD channels either! Not sure why.

* It seems to have far less content than the old Ceefax system.

* It's often slower to update live sports scores than the old Ceefax system.

* There's no option to go fullscreen teletext (and back to a right-hand column overlay with picture-in-picture in the top-left or if it's an article, the fullscreen live TV feed underneath), so news articles are squashed in a narrow column and needlessly go over 2 or more sub-pages.

* Some pages go fullscreen and cut the picture-in-picture out completely, whilst others stick to the narrow column version - it seems quite inconsistent and should really be up to the viewer to pick their display layout.

* It still only transmits plain text (with the occasional, but rare, coloured text) and is actually less "graphical" than the old analogue teletext!

I originally thought it was a downgrade myself and still do.

Don't worry - with Win 8 tiles...

[Viol8]

... you'll be able to recreate your favourite graphics on your PC desktop soon!

The B ark

[Hognoxious]

1/3 of the population lives in London or the South-East. This isn't a good thing

Yes it is, it means the other 2/3 don't have to put up with a load of shandy-drinking wankers.

Re:Unfortunately the replacement service is far wo

[Malc]

Became irrelevant with modern Freeview/Freesat devices and their superior (and faster) EPG.

Re:Unfortunately the replacement service is far wo

[RoboJ1M]

>Chain ""

Loading: 00

beeee... (continue, very long beep)

MAAARGH (ear destroying wail)

Loading: 01

beeee... (continue, very long beep)

MAAARGH (ear destroying wail)

Block.

Please rewind tape.

You know you know the noise.

And also there was that soft ticking somewhere in there two, a relay I guess.

OK, now somebody do a 5 1/4 " floppy with a disk read error.