Teletext to disappear from TV screens.

[John123]

"Teletext is set to leave our TV screens after 35 years of service in one form or another. The interactive TV news service will be pulled after profits and interest began to fall sharply in recent years."

Full story.

Well, it looks like the beginning of the end for the analogue Text service as a whole. The loss of the Teletext service just leaves BBC Ceefax, which will eventually fade away as each region goes digital.

I thought the Freeview digital Teletext service was OK, if a little slow on my ageing Netgem iPlayer set top box. Shame to lose it on there as well, oh well

[radio edgar]

This is a big shame.
On the good old analog bbc stations it used to be an absolute mine of information, you could access information about many hundreds of things, then along came digital teletext and I thought the service was a shadow of it`s former self.
Now it seems both are in demise, well I suppose with the internet and the information it provides it was only a matter of time.
The trouble is not everyone has access to the internet, so much for modern progress!!
Regards
Paul

[Heatercathodeshort]

The greatest advantage of teletext is the subtitles for the hard of hearing. It brought a new meaning to television for this group and was much valued by my customers.
With the Internet and 24 hour news channels it is inevitable that it will go. I don't think I have turned to Teletext even once in the last 15 years and there must be thousands similar. Its just the march of 'technology' [?] J.

[evingar]

The only real use I had for it was for stock prices (before the Internet came along). In a way it's a shame to see it go, but personally I can't argue against its demise becuase I haven't used it for "donkeys"

[mark pirate]

With the Internet and 24 hour news channels it is inevitable that it will go. I don't think I have turned to Teletext even once in the last 15 years and there must be thousands similar.

I have to agree, i cannot remember the last time i used it, but remember it being useful for adjusting convergence
I will be sad that the teletext button no longer has a function though.....

Mark

[CanonMan]

On my main TV, which is one of those early Sony integrated digital TVs, I prefer to use good old teletext because it's far faster at page updates than the digital text is

[marcus 3500]

I love reading the news on BBC and ITV text pages at 5AM and will very much miss it when it's gone. I wont miss the digital text, far too slow and just not the same... with the first cuppa before work.

Marcus.

[paulsherwin]

Originally Posted by Heatercathodeshort

The greatest advantage of teletext is the subtitles for the hard of hearing. It brought a new meaning to television for this group and was much valued by my customers.

Subtitling is available on all digital platforms as far as I know - certainly, it is available on Freeview if the source programme has subtitled content (hence the button marked 'Subtitle' on the RC ). It's difficult to imagine subtitling disappearing altogether, though reduced budgets may lead to more programmes not being subtitled.

Having watched subtitled programmes on both analogue and Freeview with my partially deaf father, I think that the service is marginally better on Freeview.

Paul

[richrussell]

I have found that the newer a DVB receiver you have, the faster the digital teletext. I guess that the slowness was more down to local caching and processing of the data rather than waiting for it to be transmitted.

On my OnDigital box it was like others have said, pretty unusable. On my LG LCD TV it zips along as fast as analogue Fastext (which also relies on caching pages obviously).

I found analogue text frustating when what you want to read is on page 1 of 10, and page 3 has just loaded.

[John123]

Indeed the analogue text service, although being slow, is the most reliable platform only needing a good quality analogue signal.

Some of the newer (but soon becoming vintage!) Fastext TV's with page memory were pretty good, and there were some early nineties' VCR's that used the channel listings to set timer recordings. It's only recently you can do the same thing with the Freeview EPG and a hard drive/ DVD recorder.

You could also record the pages for that particular channel when using an S-VHS machine, although I do recall managing to get the date off a cassette recorded on a very old Ferguson Videostar (when I accidentally pressed the Text button on the TV's remote).

A quick update, it looks like they're switching off in January 2010.