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Comment by solidangle | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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.

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.

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.)

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?).

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

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

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...

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

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