Teletext in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Teletext in Europe

nordicom.gu.se

84 pointsfcambus38 comments

I used to work for a company in the UK years ago, who were about the only manufacturers of teletext equipment such as inserters, etc.

One day we came into the office and the phones were on fire - people were giving our receptionists dogs abuse and threatening all sorts of repercussions as we'd apparently 'hacked' their TVs.

It turned out that one of the broadcasters has done something silly with one of the inserters and reset it to factory defaults, meaning all pages were replaced with the default 'Welcome to MRG Systems', along with our phone number.

That was not a fun day...

It's still popular in Holland and accessible via internet as well (http://nos.nl/teletekst).

I've been thinking about a sort of 'internet magazine' broadcast on old analog TV channels using a mechanism similar to how teletext works: a continuous stream of pages where more popular pages occur more frequently in the stream to reduce waiting time. The infrastructure looks very simple. Instead of RF, what about visible light? It's still possible for users to interact more closely by including slots with data directed for single users in the stream, with upstream via mobile data or wifi.

They also have apps for smartphones and the like, and it's actually extremely popular!

The quality of the news reporting on Dutch teletext has always been great, that's one of the key things. No bias, no bullshit, no unrelated stock photos. Just the facts, and very quickly.

In 2006, the random killing of an 8-year old boy was in the news a lot. When his murderer was convicted, Teletekst chose to show the news at the top of page 101, in CAPITALS... and immediately the whole national debate shifted to that use of capitals, which was obviously outrageously sensationalistic. Use of capitals for national disasters, OK, but merely this...

I never really understand why people use it, you can just download the NOS app which has exactly the same news.

I expect it will be mostly the elderly and such that use it, who don't want to use smartphones, iPads, etc?

a great article from augustus 2015 (in Dutch) explaining how and why teletekst is probably still so popular in the Netherlands. this also includes following soccer standings on game day. http://www.nu.nl/weekend/4106506/digitale-revolutie-laat-raz...

while our southern neighbours (belgium) are shutting down teletext. (article also in Dutch)

http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/belgische-omroep-vrt-sto...

I know a few people that use the teletext almost exclusively instead of watching TV.

Teletext is a surprisingly good internet substitute for basic information consumption: you get the top news, the sport result, recipes, meteo, ... Until recently (smartphone and social apps), that covered 90% of what a lot of people would do with their internet connection.

"Teletext is a surprisingly good internet substitute for basic information consumption"

I agree. Teletext feels like it would have been a perfect service for a mobile phone.

In the UK, the BBC stopped transmission of their teletext service (Ceefax) in 2012. One of the limitations of the service for writers was that it could only display four paragraphs of text on a single screen. This meant any news or sport story had to include all the key points in just those four paragraphs. This forced journalists and writers to be concise and to the point. (It's actually a great writing exercise to try on any news or sport story, or even essay)

Now in the digital age we have apps like Yahoo Digest/Summly that give you concise summaries of the news with large photos (after you've downloaded the 30mb phone app). But teletext did plain, concise text from the start (with real writers) because of the constraints of the technology. And those constraints turned out to be a large part of the appeal of teletext.

> This forced journalists and writers to be concise and to the point.

... and remove any context, even more than they already do.

Don't we always complain about how computer and tech pieces are too simplistic and outright wrong, but catchy?

> This forced journalists and writers to be concise and to the point.

We need to bring teletext back.

It's still strong in Germany and even available over the web (http://www.ard-text.de/) and a mobile-friendly site with the same content: http://www.ard-text.de/mobil/100

Seems like a startup opportunity to me - citizen journalism somewhere between Twitter and Medium. 4 paragraphs, 1 image per story. I'd sign up.

This is pretty close https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

Here a link to the ORF(Austrian Broadcast Station) teletext: http://teletext.orf.at/

I don't like it, I prefer more thorough news. For me the problem with reading news is not that the writers are writing too long winded, but that they don't give you enough background information.

I guess it addresses a fundamental desire for calmness and simplicity - most likely similar to what drives some nerds towards attempting to do as much as possible in a text based way and in a terminal.

It's like the Linux Shell for people who never even heard of Linux.

I used to use it everyday before I moved to the US 4 years ago mainly for sports results, quick overview of news, weather and stock numbers.

Now it is of course different with apps and smartphones everywhere, but the simplicity of teletext was amazing. It was so clean information without distractions, you just went on page number and the information you were looking for was there. Without ads, quite quickly. I remember checking NHL results every morning exclusively on teletext.

The simplicity of it is unsurpassed till these days

I was a fan, back in the 80s. There was something restful about the minute or two it took for each page to arrive.

And it was fun watching the designers trying to add creativity to blocky 24 x 40 char pages.

> designers trying to add creativity to blocky 24 x 40 char pages

As well as the "sexy" art on the dating and phone sex advertising pages. Apparently any number of pixels is enough pixels to render boobies.

My grandfather used to read it daily when he was visiting my family home. He was deaf so it was his main use of TV set. Also at the time he didn't have TV with teletext at his own home. First channel of public television had news pages and that was what he was reading almost exclusively. He was in his 70s and didn't use glasses to read, but he was sitting near the screen.

Now I wonder, if he would still be alive, would he use Internet with tablet. He also used to read newspapers, but teletext was cheaper :)

In Poland public television called teletext TeleGazeta (TeleNewspaper) and use of the name I believe was reserved only for public TV. Nevertheless most people I knew called teletext on every channel as TeleGazeta.

Our TV set was sold by the manufacturer without teletext, but it was added by a seller. Remote didn't had keys dedicated for teletext so few keys had different function in teletext mode.

> Now I wonder, if he would still be alive, would he use Internet with tablet. He also used to read newspapers, but teletext was cheaper :)

He would want to, but I'm not sure if any site would be accessible enough for him.

It's really annoying that some developers ignore the fact that many people with disability are early adopters of tech.

I remember following the chess world championship matches on Teletext back in the day. Not covered by TV or radio, this was the only way to follow it live. I have 'fond' memories of waiting for the numbers to come round and wondering whether the latest move had been made.

I still use teletext pretty much daily. NOS (Netherlands) have a pretty good web interface as well.

http://nos.nl/teletekst

Teletext is the only exception to the general rule that TV based information services (interactive TV) don't get popular adoption. However it has to be remembered that in its day it was the ONLY live information service people had access to. Even rolling news was not available for most people.

The reasons interactive TV doesn't usually take off is because at a distance interaction via a remote control isn't a pleasant experience and the TV is a shared display whereas the interaction is usually a solitary experience.

Services where you can navigate to video/photo content is different category and can be popular if the content is good.

Games are another different category that can be a social experience and the challenge of mastering the controls is part of the experience not a barrier (in good games anyway).

The BBC used to distribute software for home micros via teletext pages. Not source to type in, but encoded pages.

Ah yes, you needed a Teletext Decoder: http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/Teletext/Teletext.html

as far as I know "Televideo" (teletext by the public broadcasting) is still active in Italy, and useable via web too

http://www.servizitelevideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp

I join the other commenters in remembering with nostalgia looking up sport results and weather forecasts.

Sweet sweet nostalgia... Thanks for that trip down memory late. Here's the current version of the Portuguese national broadcaster's teletext http://www.rtp.pt/wportal/teletexto/

I remember spending hours as a child playing Bamboozle on Channel 4 Teletext. I distinctly recall figuring out how to always get the right answer by trying all options and seeing which one went to a different page than the others before the next page (Wrong Answer) actually loaded.

http://www.rtve.es/television/teletexto/

Spain, from the national public TV.

One thing I remember brightly about my childhood was that every time there was an ETA terrorist attack, the teletext was the only known place to get "rolling" updates about the details: With radio and TV you are up to the broadcaster to get more details, and usually only the last update. While with the teletext you could get both the overall information and the last updates all in a single place. Nowadays when something like this happens people turn to Twitter, either from a known source (newspaper) or from eye witnesses.

I still use it almost every day. Today it has a web interface (http://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html), which has been interfaced to smartphone apps. Why do I use it? It's a quick way to get summaries of what is happening at home.

The use of teletext news, even among younger people, was a surprising discovery from my time living in Sweden a few years ago. I wrote some observations about it at the time: http://blog.meshul.am/2013/03/05/let-them-read-text/

I still check the Swiss teletext (http://www.teletext.ch/) multiple times a day. It remains the fastest way to check if something important happened. Most of my friends and colleagues make fun of me when I read blocky teletext on my quadHD phone though :)

Finland: http://yle.fi/tekstitv/

Germany, some of the more popular stations...

ZDF - http://module.zdf.de/teletext/master.html

Das Erste - http://www.ard-text.de/

RTL - http://www.ard-text.de/

ProSieben - https://www.sevenonemedia.de/teletext-viewer

Not a bad way to brush up on my German actually ;)