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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

> I managed to get it running, despite Teletext being killed off years ago.

It's still going strong here in Germany. The Teletext service run by ARD alone still had 19 M users 2 years ago [0]. You can even use it in a browser [1]. My father uses it heavily and with split-screen to get up-to-date sports results and news without all the BS he has to deal with on the internet as someone over 60 (notifications, cookie warnings, usability changes every 6 months, fear of accidentally "clicking somewhere dangerous", ads). I suspect he uses Teletext for the same reasons I visit HN for.

Somewhat ironically, his Teletext (his TV signal) has been delivered via Internet for over a decade now.

[0] https://www.rbb-online.de/unternehmen/der_rbb/rbb_in_der_ard....

[1] https://www.ard-text.de/

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Same here. The Dutch public broadcaster even switched to a brand new cloud-based Teletext system last November. The old system was breaking down too often and not many people still knew how it worked, so a brand new system was developed to replace the old one.

Not only is Teletext still used very often, the public broadcaster is also legally obligated to have Teletext, and for aviators the law specifies Teletext as one of three legal options for pilots to check the weather on when preparing for a flights.

The Dutch news site tweakers wrote a small piece about this upgrade last week (use your favourite translation tool): https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...

I understood that it was mostly because the software was out of support for a while already.

Yeah - it kind of blew my mind when I picked up a cheap DVBS satellite receiver box recently, tuned my dish to a satellite that carried German services, and found plain old Teletext running beautifully well on HD TV channels, rendered pixel perfect on my TV via HDMI. Mind boggling!

I should have maybe clarified that it was killed off here in the UK, I will amend it.

Is that true? I thought the protests in 2020 stopped the shut off?

Teletext and BBC Red Button are essentially the same, just with quite a few lick of paints. I think you can still access Red Button to this day?

They’re not the same and I don’t think they’ve ever been synonymous with each other (or at least not by people who work in the Broadcasting industry).

Red Button is the service that replaced teletext/ceefax in 2012. Teletext was an analogue service, Red button was a whole new digital service offering similar information, it’s entirely different infrastructure underneath, it’s not just a “lick of paint”.

You're right. My bad. I worked on a modernisation project for the DVB version of this in 2018. Internally we used to refer to it as Teletext, hence my confusion.

> Teletext was an analogue service

Teletext was a _digital_ service provided over an _analogue_ bearer - the modulation of the signal is continuous, not discrete.

"Teletext" in this context is a signalling protocol for transmitting text content over PAL TV, for decoding by an appropriate receiver.

The BBC's service was branded "Ceefax", ITV and Channel 4 branded theirs "Teletext".

The current 'red button' service is a completely different protocol running on DVB (Digital Video Broadcast, i.e. digital TV). Text packets are added to the MPEG-2 stream.

Ah, my apologies then. My confusion was that I didn't think there was a difference between the current mechanism and the old one.

FWIW you can still get Teletext over MPEG TS (DVB or IPTV), it's just already de-modulated, but even error correction bits are still there (and are useless).

In France most IPTV operators still use teletext for live subtitling because it eats much less bandwidth than dvbsub

The ITV/C4 service was originally Oracle; this was later replaced by “Teletext Ltd”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORACLE_(teletext)

Teletext/Ceefax has been dead since the analog switch-off in 2012. Red Button uses MHEG-5.

> You can even use it in a browser

Interestingly an intern at a telecoms research company where I worked in IT was tasked with using an OTA teletext receiver to convert teletext to web circa 1995/96.

I don't recall the details about it, other than that he got it working, after reverse engineering the (serial?) protocol the supplied software used. But nothing ever became of that project as far as I know.

In the netherlands, one of the earlier internet companies created this in the 90s as well. If I remember correctly it was first a java applet and then ported to JS with a CGI bin talking to the input hardware.

I think it is used more via their website than via the television signal these days, at least in the Netherlands.

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