How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead | Hacker News Reader

How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead

techradar.com

122 pointsingve64 comments

Teletext is still available here in The Netherlands, the public broadcaster [1] and some of the commercial channels still have teletext pages. If you have an internet connection (which 96% of the households in the Netherlands [2] have) there's absolutely no point in using it as the same (and more) information is available on their websites, but it's still an important source of information for the elders.

[1] http://nos.nl/teletekst

[2] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2015/11/9-in-10-people-access-...

Yeah it's hugely popular here. It's not just the elderly, it's also popular amongst younger people too.

I think it's predictability is it's strength. You get news at 101, sport at 600, weather at 700 and, if you haven't found the button on your remote, the tv schedules at 200.

Completely different in former Yugoslav region.

101 is a Table of Content, domestic news at 110, world news at 120, interesting news at 130, celebrities at 140, TV schedule starts at 300, and 700+ are usually betting ads combined with live sport results.

It's not only for the elders. It's just very up to date, it's not filled with celebrity non-news as other channels are, and it's succinct.

A lot of modern TV's also support a split-screen feature where the left of the screen is regular TV, and the right is teletext. My uncle uses that a lot while watching sports.

> it's succinct

This is what I liked the best back when I lived in Sweden. It was basically Twitter for news. Also back then news web sites just collapsed when there was a breaking store so that was another plus.

I love using teletext over the internet, as it is often much faster than other websites.

In the UK, we have the BBC Red Button. Incredibly useful in a hotel in the morning.

Yes, that's the system that the BBC wants to replace teletext with. As far as I know, it has not been implemented in any other country. I haven't seen much of it, but my impression is that it doesn't offer enough additional functionality over teletext, so other countries just stuck with that; for new functionality, it has basically been overtaken by the internet.

When it works it's really good, but that's for one specific thing at a time - Olympics or Glastonbury for example. It's a shame really, someone in one of the other comments mentioned split-screen with TV and teletext which I think is ideal for some things (eg football, for me), and red button stuff just isn't as simple, or give anything like the same consistency

Other countries have adopted HbbTV instead and it looks like the BBC will also switch away from MHEG: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/statements/hbb-tv-standards

If you want to see the true horror of MHEG programming, here's the source for a simple space invaders game in it:

http://digvid.info/mheg5/invade.php

Do other countries run a similar information service using MHEG or HbbTV (news, weather, sports results, exchange rates, that kind of thing?).

In Japan we have the "d button" with similar services - weather, news headlines, and for some shows dedicated program information and interactive services like voting. Of course they use a home-grown standard called BML

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_Markup_Language

"The STD-B24 specification is derived from an early draft of XHTML 1.0 strict, which it extends and alters. Some subset of CSS 1 and 2 is supported, as well as ECMAScript."

It can look something like this:

Weather/news http://www.city.isa.kagoshima.jp/image/mbc.jpg

Realtime twitter timeline http://trendy.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/column/20101201/1033778...

It's also a lot slower than teletext, especially the fasttext / caching teletext TVs.

Same in Nordics (Finland, Sweden, Norway).

It's not true that there wouldn't be point in using teletext even if the same information is available over the web. First of all, the access to teletext is convenient if you just have the TV remote - browsing with so-called "smart TV's" is painful (bad UX) and switching to an actual computer involves changing TV input, and losing possibility to watch TV picture and hear the sound at the same time.

Lots of people here use teletext e.g. to check up sports results and latest news on headline level.

And, as someone pointed out, even the Web version of Text-TV pages is often good: it's snappy and fast even if you only have a 2G connection.

Sweden: http://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html

Finland: http://www.yle.fi/tekstitv/txt/P100_01.html

Norway: https://nrk.no/tekst-tv/100/

Denmark: http://www.dr.dk/nav/tekstttv/indexx.htm

(These are the public broadcaster pages; commercial channels have their own, similar ones.)

And Iceland:

http://www.textavarp.is/100/

I left that out because I can't read it at all :) But yes, same thing.

It differs a lot by country. For example, Flemish (Belgian) teletext has just been switched off.

French speaking part of the country still have it, even online [0]

[0] http://www.rtbf.be/services/teletexte

Good.

I have the mobile site of the teletext by one of the German public broadcasters bookmarked in my phone simply because it loads so quickly even on a slow mobile 2G connection: http://www.ard-text.de/mobil/100

woah ... this is cool. only knew the more traditional teletext website: http://www.ard-text.de/

I also found it interesting that Teletext is supposedly dead, but then the article itself links to another article that mentions how art contest winners will be broadcast in Germany, in the Teletext of broadcaster ARD... so... which one is it?

Further more, there are a large amount of people who use a teletekst app on their phone and their twitter account has almost 120k followers

I'm a Dutch student, some of my classmates still use teletext.

I'm sick to the back teeth of getting news from web pages, because there's about 1 kilobyte of text I want to read and megabyte upon megabyte of other crap from logos to tracking cookies to ads that I don't give a shit about. IT's not so uncommon to tap on a news story on my phone and find it takes longer to load than it did to read.

It's ridiculously inefficient from the point of the news consumer, which is logical since the news consumer is basically the product in a transaction between content delivery firms and advertisers. New news has always been supported by advertising, but it's gone past the point of absurdity into being economically unsustainable. The western social order is clearly on the verge of a breakdown, not least because public trust of the media is at a nadir and so large segments of the population have abandoned truth-seeking as a component of their media experience and drifted more and more towards validation. This is going to end badly.

Use Lynx (or Links)!

Use netsurf, substitute www. in the ULRp's with m.

Example: m.xkcd.com, m.twitter.com, m.cnn.com, m.fox.com.

I am smiling across my front teeth, so rare is it that I read

> I'm sick to the back teeth

Thank you for keeping this colloquialism in circulation.

Weirdly the NOS even has a Teletext app that I regularly see people using.

That's not weird at all.

It's lightweight (and thus fast!) and curated by a reliable news source.

It gives, at any given moment, the 10 most important news items. Try that on a news site.

I use it more than a dozen times a day...

Last weekend at Assembly[0] there was a teletext entry in the wild compo[1][2]

I know people who use one of the various ios apps to watch the local public broadcasting teletext (teksti-tv), because it is a fast and easy way to look at the news, with descriptive titles without clickbaits :) Web versions of course available too[3]

[0] http://www.assembly.org [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_To2TwIrWqQ [2] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67927 [3] http://www.yle.fi/tekstitv/html/P100_01.html

Mentioned at the end of that demo: https://github.com/ali1234/raspi-teletext

Now I really want to write a HackerNews -> VTT app!

"FPS: Maybe"

That's awesome.

I grew up in the US, so had no awareness of this system, at all. It was really surreal reading about it (and the French Minitel, etc.) when the Internet started becoming popular; it was inevitably compared to the existing services that provided some of the same capabilities. I was like, "WTF? Why didn't I have access to anything like that when I was a kid? That sounds awesome!"

The BBC Micro, one of the most popular 8-bit micros in the UK, contained a teletext decoder chip, the Mullard SAA5050. (There was an addon available that would let you display Ceefax pages displayed over the air with it; for a while they even broadcast programs using the Ceefax system, which you could download.)

It was mainly used as a cheap and cheerful display mode, as it consumed a mere 1kB of video memory and got you fast, colourful, chunky graphics, and at the same time gave an entire generation detailed knowledge of the innards of the teletext system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqzkGkIrbd8

It was a pig to program for: it was (mostly) just a simple 40x25 array of bytes, one for each character. Special effects were done by using command bytes, which showed up (mostly) as a space. So, to change the foreground colour to red, you used a 129 byte. But that used up a character. Getting good effects took skill. Notice the way in that game the colours are separated by line? That's because there'll be two control bytes at the beginning of each line, one to set the colour and one to set block graphics mode, and the visible portion occupies the other 38 characters...

Teletext is still alive in many parts of Europe. The Austrian broadcaster still has a service and they have an online interface for it: http://teletext.orf.at/

Teletext found its niche.

The Austrian broadcaster ORF even released an TELETEXT app (!) this year [1], available for Android [2] and iOS [3].

An then there is also art, as with every "old" tech. Check out the International Teletext Art Festival [4].

[1] http://futurezone.at/apps/orf-teletext-app-fuer-ios-und-andr... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.orf.teletex... [3] https://itunes.apple.com/at/app/orf-teletext/id1063231874

[4] http://www.teletextart.com

Dutch teletekst has had one for years. Strange, actually, that each country is releasing its own.

Here's the online version of Finland's national public-broadcasting company's teletext: http://www.yle.fi/tekstitv/txt/P100_01.html

The UI of its guide to the Rio games (http://www.yle.fi/tekstitv/txt/P602_01.html) is actually wildly preferable to the web version (http://yle.fi/urheilu/rio_2016).

This is the epitome of the famous Mark E. Smith quote "the finest of British attention to the wrong detail." I admire the level of geekiness involved in recovering Teletext from old VHS tapes.

I'm waiting for the announcement that Gopher[1] is coming back from the dead!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

I use the swiss teletext app daily, it's the fastest way for me to consume informations and sport results.

Also works without the app: http://m.txt.ch

I live in the U.S.. Why did I never know about this and why was it not more popular here? Is it totally gone now that analog signals are gone?

And now reading how it's popular in other countries, it makes me so angry!

I live in the US and I've never heard of any of this either.

I have just three digits: 302

Which teletext service?

From memory, that's the BBC football page.

It's either the main page or the latest scores 'vide-printer' style service.

[hums MOTD theme to himself].

Ha I used to work with Peter from the article at MRG Systems, who were a primary supplier of teletext equipment to broadcasters:

http://www.mrgsystems.co.uk/about-us/historyskills.php

https://www.kitplus.com/FORSALE/Audio/Other/MRG_Systems/DTP_...

Interesting article but somewhat misleading

Please explain why it is misleading.

What would you think of an article titled "Steam locomotives are coming back from the deads" when someone restore an old locomotive in his garage?

Slightly OT, but a group in the UK actually recently built a steam locomotive and operate it fairly regularly[0], so steam is kinda back from the dead…

[0]https://www.a1steam.com

Teletext was never dead... it never stopped working. The digital switch didn't leave a gap in which teletext where no more.

Did it not die when the analog signal was switched off?

Not in some parts of Europe at least. It was just carried over to the digital signal. I honestly don't know how, but there must be room for it in the DVB-T/C/S signals.

In DVB (and IPTV systems that use MPEG TS) Teletext is sent in its own pid, along with the audio and video pids of the program being watched ( for the details you can check ETSI 300 472).

vlc btw contains a decoder for teletext pages, you can tune in to a dvb stream and look at them.

Trivia: in some countries (for instance in Switzerland) subtitles for movies are sent sometimes as semitransparent teletext pages (in CH it is on page 777) even if DVB supports natively subtitles.

One might naturally assume from the article title that at some point I'm going to be able to hit the teletext button on my tv and see ... teletext.

But what this is, is someone who has found a way to broadcast their own text service to their own tv. Kind of interesting of course, but not really the service coming back from the dead.

Teletext still works in Italy on digital tv. By heart: 103 latest news, 110 news index, 201 football index, 202 serie A results and 203 leaderboard. 295-298 results and leaderboard of major European leagues, 261 other sports index. If I have the tv switched on it's faster than my tablet.

The mother uses it all the time to get the latest Lotto numbers.

"poor mans internet" they said.

Perhaps, according to the Europeans in this thread, also the "busy man's internet"?

It sounds like there's less fluff, trash, and noise to wade through.

Don't do a google image search for "teletext". About 1.5 pages down is a goatce in teletext. Ick!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com