BBC Turns Off CEEFAX Service After 38 Years 160
Kittenman writes "After 38 years (1974 - 2012) the BBC's CEEFAX service has ceased transmission. The service gave on-line up-to-date textual information (albeit in condensed form) to TV viewers in the pre-Internet era and afterwards. Its final broadcast signed off with, 'Goodbye, cruel world.' '... the real impetus for viewers came when BBC Television decided to use a selection of Ceefax pages, accompanied by music, before the start of programming each day. Initially called Ceefax AM and Ceefax In Vision, the Pages From Ceefax "programme" continued for 30 years, being broadcast overnight on BBC Two until this week. As viewers got a small taste of what Ceefax had to offer, millions of Britons during the 1980s invested in new teletext-enabled TV sets which gave them access to the full Ceefax service, which by now included recipe details for dishes prepared on BBC cookery shows, share prices, music reviews and an annual advent calendar.' An British ex-PM (John Major) said, 'From breaking global news to domestic sports news, Ceefax was speedy, accurate and indispensable. It can be proud of its record.'"
good side of the BBC (Score:5, Informative)
An example to many broadcasters around the world, very advanced in its views. Still one of my favourites.
*Used to be* good side of the BBC (Score:5, Insightful)
An example to many broadcasters around the world, very advanced in its views. Still one of my favourites.
Unfortunately, it's no more.
After Rutgers U turned off Usenet, BBC turned off Ceefax.
Looks like good stuffs just ain't made to last as long as their rotten counterparts.
Wonder what's next ... ?
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Re:*Used to be* good side of the BBC (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is compounded because it's quite slow. Most boxes I've used are not caching the content so feeling reminds me of teletext circa 1980. You have to sit there for ages waiting for the carousel to deliver the content the box is waiting on. To improve responsiveness the data stream has to keep repeating the indexes and main content more frequently. It also doesn't work with recorded content since most PVRs strip out the data stream unlike Ceefax which would survive. I assume some boxes would cache content so the responsiveness could be improved.
The main other use of Ceefax was subtitles, and subtitles are handled through a different mechanism. Transport streams from the BBC contain a subtitle track and often also a separate narration audio track too for blind people.
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[Digital teletext] also doesn't work with recorded content since most PVRs strip out the data stream unlike Ceefax which would survive.
If you recorded onto Series 1 Tivo, Ceefax didn't survive.
*Some* VCRs would preserve enough of the frame for Ceefax to work when you played back a recording. I think it was more through accident than design though. More usually, it would be recorded in distorted form, which meant amusingly garbled subtitles, and some education in how a digital system might handle corrupt input data.
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On digital streams IIRC teletext was sent as packets in the stream and the SoC would reconsitute the packets into
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I'm not so sure about that. The problem might be that VHS has some, um, leniency as to how long a head switch takes. I bet the head switch obliterates the teletext scanline...
It was the *first* digital consumer service (Score:5, Insightful)
The BBC has moved to digital "teletext"
Obligatory rant. As I commented on the BBC site, despite being piggybacked onto the analogue TV signal, old-style Teletext itself is- and always was- a digital service.
This matters not simply because it was digital, but more importantly because it was probably the first digital service- or digital anything!- aimed at the consumer market, at least in the UK.
And despite all the nostalgic ramblings, it has hardly been given any credit for what is probably its most significant aspect. Years before CDs came out, even before even the Apple II and friends launched the personal computer (and when the closest thing to a home computer was the Altair 8800 [wikipedia.org]), Teletext was digital and providing information on demand.
I don't feel the need to defend its shortcomings by modern standards- of course it's dated and basic, it's over 35 bloody years old and came out when even the 1 KB of memory needed to store a page would have been expensive. However, it was a fantastic achievement at the time and still heralded the digital age, however primitive it looks today. And it hacks me off that almost no-one is giving it credit in that area.
Re:It was the *first* digital consumer service (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah I hate it when they do that. Not only was it digital, it was interactive as well.
Fast-text (the coloured buttons) even gave you hyper links.
Hell, you could download software to your home computer over it!
There were digital publications (Digitizer!! 8D)
There were interactive games (Bamboozle!)
There was even at one point a chat room (You had to phone up and type in your message using, I think, SMS style text input)
Finally, I remember voice controlled teletext. You phoned up, set it up, browsed to one of the sub pages, spoke into the phone and the right page turned up on the screen.
All that by the early 90s.
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Forgot PDC, which started/stopped the VCR when you wanted something recorded, even keeping up with schedule changes.
There was even a system that allowed you to select programs off of an EPG and the VCR would record them for you.
So we had Tivo too.
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Yes - Telesoftware from P700 on BBC2. This was discontinued a long while ago though.
There were also teletext adaptors from several outfits including Morley for the BBC Micro that connected to your TV aerial and downloaded the content straight into the computer.
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Re:good side of the BBC (Score:5, Funny)
Bit of background on the TeleText standard (Score:3)
This [Teletext/Cx, branded as CeeFax for consumers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext%5D [wikipedia.org] is (one of the many) the standard that my department (BBC R&D) helped invent - http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications/rdreport_1975_12.shtml [bbc.co.uk]
I was a baby then but nowadays we still used the standard to test the next-gen DTV aerial signal 25 years on http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP160.pdf [bbc.co.uk])
I was part of the team that moved the 'red button' services across to use same page numbers (with an e
I'm not British (Score:2)
Until now, I didn't know CEEFAX even existed - it sounds like it was a good use of technology for its time. However despite what some movie and music moguls believe, you can't halt the march of technology, and eventually time renders every tech obsolete.
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Really? Time doesn't seem to have obsoleted the wheel yet.
Re:I'm not British (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have flying cars where you live?
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They don't have flying cars where you live?
Yes, but I still have to steer it!
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They don't have flying cars where you live?
Only on slashdot could this be modded as insightful rather than funny.
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They don't have flying cars where you live?
No, but we do have aircraft and they still have wheels.
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Of course they did, it has rounded corners!
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Time doesn't seem to have obsoleted the wheel yet.
That's because "the wheel" isn't a specific technology.
Almost every kind of wheel ever invented has been obsoleted. This is why cars roll around on radial tyres on steel or alloy wheels, rather than wooden wagon wheels with steel tyres or just roll on crudely cut logs.
You may as well say "computing devices" hve not been obsoleted yet, even though almost every specific instance has been.
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And you can, it is on Red Button now.
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Really? Time doesn't seem to have obsoleted the wheel yet.
Careful it could be covered by a patent. Its just a rectangle with very rounded corners
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A triangular wheel has fewer bumps than a rectangular wheel, so its corners can be less rounded...
Race you to the patent office ... oh no prior art [metro.co.uk].
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Several countries still offer this service under various names. In The Netherlands it is called "Teletekst" and besides being available on the TV set, you can also find it online: http://teletekst.nos.nl/ [teletekst.nos.nl]
I read Teletekst almost every day and I dearly miss Ceefax which since a longer time is no longer broadcast over satellite channels.
The Dutch the web implementation has serious issues with synchronisation and page linking. Never noticed that sometimes you see half a page? Never noticed that the arrows sometimes just don't bring you to a linked page? Those are tedious little bugs which should be fixed. In more than 15 years of using the service I haven't found time to report them them. The shame is on me
Re:I'm not British (Score:5, Informative)
One of the best parts of the BBC CeeFax was the subtitles. It was provided as service for the deaf (so you would get extra notes like "doorbell ringing"), it was also great for people who could not understand English so fluently as it was usually a literal transcription of what was being said. Fantastic help for learning to understand spoken English.
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Subtitles are still freely and easily available on all BBC channels, just using different technology. So it's not as if anyone's going to miss Ceefax's ancient and quirky provision of them.
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Teletext is slow by its nature. It simply broadcasts every page, in a loop, over and over again.
With early receivers, you just had to wait.
Later on, when RAM got a bit cheaper, receivers would detect the four page numbers linked to the coloured buttons, and cache the content of those next time they were broadcast.
Eventually RAM got cheap enough that receivers would just cache the full set of pages.
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Eventually RAM got cheap enough that receivers would just cache the full set of pages.
Yes, I noticed that the TV I bought a couple of years ago had incredibly fast Teletext access, obviously because it was automatically caching every page as soon as it was received.
An obvious step, given that holding the complete output of one channel would be a low number of megabytes.
Of course, that would have been a ludicrously large and expensive amount of memory in the mid-70s (when even the kilobyte needed for a single page would have been a non-trivial cost), which is probably why those early sets did
Re:I'm not British (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally think it is not that the technology of Ceefax has finished, it is more the content. Digital Terrestrial TV services in the UK also offer various text-based services in a much more modern interface, however, there is just not the same quantity of content that Ceefax carried. Ceefax was a bit like a condensed newspaper, whereas the current "Red button" services are more like just the front page of a newspaper. But then again, if you are receiving BBC digital transmissions you also have access to far more channels than when Ceefax was launched, including a 24-hour news channel, so maybe it is not necessary. But for me what is more telling is the BBC have not thought it necessary to completely migrate the Ceefax levels of content onto the digital "red button" services. There was nothing on there that nowadays could not be found on the internet, after all.
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nstead of use only the computer power equivalent to a Z80.
waaaaaaaay less computing power. It was a very simple state machine, and could be implemented on a simple chip. The BBC micro (6502 powered) had a teletext chip because it used 1k of memory and was cheaper than adding tons of extra RAM to store store a frame buffer. The BBC could also do frame buffer graphics, but the largest took a rather substantial fraction of the available memory.
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I'm not British either and English is not my native language. When I watch the BBC, I almost always turn on real time subtitling through their Ceefax service in order to understand everything better.
Now that Ceefax is considered obsolete, those days are over. It sure makes it a lot harder for me to enjoy their broadcasts.
Those Days Are Indeed Over (Score:2)
I'm quite happy those days are over myself, the teletext subtitles were hardly perfect. They performed their function well enough, however the rendering, timing and positioning was often a problem.
In my opinion that sort of feature ought to be taken care of automatically by your viewing apparatus (TV, PC, phone or tablet). The information should either be available as a hidden data stream or interpreted live (speech-to-text). Subtitles should naturally adapt to your display's size and resolution, perhaps ev
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I would like things to be better as well. But the reality is that I used to have subtitles and now I don't. It's hard to see that as an improvement.
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What technology do you use to watch BBC wherever you are?
The BBC certainly provides subtitles for all their DVB streams. It would surprise me if a legitimate carrier didn't retain them.
In many countries, there are legal reasons why broadcasters are obliged to provide subtitles for the deaf.
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As a British citizen you may not know that "using the red button" activates a feature in your digital receiver that is only
available in receivers sold to UK customers. What we buy in the rest of the world does not have that function.
We can receive teletekst and DVB subtitling, but not "the red button" services.
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The red button does something else entirely on my set top box. The BBC's digital services only work from within the UK.
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The red button does something else entirely on my set top box. The BBC's digital services only work from within the UK.
Not true - the BBC digital services will work on any receiver that supports MHEG-5 - no requirement to be in the UK (as if the receiver knows where it is anyway...)
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How? Without Ceefax, I'm not sure if there is way to get subtitling on the BBC from abroad.
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Fortunately the BBC also transmits DVB subtitling.
However, the typical cable company does not relay it to the clients yet.
Maybe this changes in the future?
Right now, I can enable subtitles on my satellite receiver, but not on Ziggo digital cable.
(on analogue cable you are probably out of luck - DVB subtitling cannot be converted to teletext)
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I've lived close to the British culture and deep in the French one. It sounds a bit like when the French turned off the Minitel (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/28/1241252/france-ending-minitel-service). Both early interactive services which came over an old delivery method (TV sets for Ceefax, telephone lines for the Minitel).
It's sad to see them go, but it's probably also time to acknowledge that they are obsolete (and costly to maintain) compared to the Internet.
I remember our first Ceefax set (Score:5, Interesting)
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Digital TV in the UK still has a text service, and still has subtitles it's just not called Ceefax anymore but "red button" ....
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DTS (Digital Text Service) != Ceefax.
Never was, never intended to be. DTS is about so much more than a 70-word soundbite. It's also a gateway to parallel channels.
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sorry, did I say 70 words? I meant 70 characters!
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Just in case the internet was wondering : wain/wean = wee-one = small-one
If it ain't broken... (Score:5, Informative)
It's still alive and kicking here in the Netherlands, known as Teletekst. Every journalist wants to be on page 101.
There's even a web-interface and an iPhone app for it, which is a no-nonsense, clutter-free, low-bandwidth source of news, weather, stocks and sport results. I can't live without it :)
http://teletekst.nos.nl/ [teletekst.nos.nl]
I must say that I rarely use it on my tv anymore. Which is kind of funny, because nowadays it's still trapped inside the low-tech interface of the 70s although it's mostly used on devices so advanced that even the big visionaries of that age couldn't even dream about it.
Is it nostalgia? Or more like the Stockholm Syndrome? Or does it just hit a sweet spot of usability and simplicity?
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Personally, I have not used it since we got triple play fiber ten years ago. Even when I used it, it was a pain, as my TV at the time did not buffer the pages. Any page change involved watching the page counter going through all the pages I did not want until it
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It is still alive in Norway (and I guess a lot of countries) as well.
In what form? According to Wikipedia analogue TV was turned off in Norway in 2009.
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The DVB standard ETSI ETS 300 743 [etsi.org] defines a method for transmitting Teletext data over a DVB (MPEG-TS) stream. This method is used in the DVB countries which maintain the old Teletext service alongside with the digital broadcasts. DVB set-top boxes and TV sets with an integrated DVB receiver/decoder commonly include a Teletext browser.
UK has chosen to abolish Teletext in favor of an MHEG-5 based [wikipedia.org] information service – known as the “red button” service by the viewers. However, this does not
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One of the alleged problems of teletekst is claimed to be that everything has to be in a 24x40 character frame,
of which in practice only 24x39 is usable, and of course all the standard headers and footers further subtract
from that to leave maybe 20x39 available for each news item.
But while that is limited space and the youngsters undoubtedly would want more space to express the content,
those youngsters invented twitter and use text messaging, with even shorter messages!
I think it actually is a strength of t
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The Dutch language is well fitted for quirky creativeness. Last week they managed to announce the death of a pioneer in the field of bone marrow transplants in just 34 letters and one space :)
http://www.spatiegebruik.nl/popup.php?id=3418 [spatiegebruik.nl] (4th headline)
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Teletext by BBC (Score:2)
Ceefax was Teletext.
Teletext (or "broadcast teletext") is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules. Subtitle (or closed captioning) information is also transmitted in the teletext signal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext [wikipedia.org]
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I can't get over how fast that client is... after sitting through broadcast Teletext and waiting for pages to cycle round, it's interesting to see how much more usable the system becomes when it's responsive. Those 40x24ish pages actually contain a reasonable amount of text to take in at one glance. (Although of course I can't actually read the Dutch version.) I think people are right, and the brevity required by the small pages is actually an advantage.
(When I was small we had one of those modern Fasttex
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Many modern TV sets (from mid-to-late 1990s and onwards) and DVB set-top boxes can cache all Teletext magazines – including subpages – which makes browsing the content a breeze.
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... and yet on another /. story, people are complaining about the price and availability of mobile internet.
There is only so much spectrum. Analogue TV was not an efficient use of it.
Farewell MODE 7 (Score:2)
Goodnight
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20 PRINT CHR$(141);CHR$(136);CHR$(129);"Goodbye Cruel World"
30 PRINT CHR$(141);CHR$(136);CHR$(132);"Goodbye Cruel World"
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*FX201,1
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I had (and still have) an Acorn Electron, so the syntax of MODE 7 has always been beyond me :-(
Teletext (Score:2)
As a USian, I'd like to remind folks that some of this tech once [wikipedia.org] leaked over to this side of the pond.
I remember, 20 or so years ago, being at a BBS-friend's house and being totally enthralled with his then-fancy Zenith TV: Just tune to one of Ted Turner's many cable channels, push the appropriate button, and news, weather, cheesy games, and random became individually accessible...without modem or a phone line.
I always thought it was very cool tech, and I'm still not sure if it is matched in any meaningful
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It sounds like Teletext (Score:2)
That sounds like Teletext which we had in New Zealand from about 1984
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That sounds like Teletext which we had in New Zealand from about 1984
Yes, 10 years after the BBC invented it and gave it to you
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http://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=54404 [vintage-radio.net]
TFS is not accurate. As usual! (Score:3)
The Ceefax service to mainland UK shut off in February this year, leaving Northern Ireland as the only area left with coverage.
Oh, and the original ad for Ceefax claimed "it is made up of two words: Cee and Fax." But of a silly one, that.
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Those two words were "See" and "Facts".
Makes more sense now yes?
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The Ceefax service to mainland UK shut off in February this year, leaving Northern Ireland as the only area left with coverage.
Oh, and the original ad for Ceefax claimed "it is made up of two words: Cee and Fax." But of a silly one, that.
It was turned off in 2007 in Whitehaven. In Manchester it was 2009. It was only the stragglers in London, NI and the Channel Islands that hung on til this year.
A Great Hack (Score:2)
This lasted for nearly 3 decades, and was only really obsoleted in the days of DVB-T. That's pretty good going, and definitely served a purpose: subtitles, news, stock market information and cheap holiday adverts...
DataBlast, a small magazine that delivered pages of text at 5 per second (I think) during the titles of Bad Influence - a T
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DataBlast, a small magazine that delivered pages of text at 5 per second (I think) during the titles of Bad Influence - a TV programme in the UK devoted to computer games - was probably inspired by Ceefax/Oracle. You needed to record the section on video (remember them?) and then use pause to read the content.
I remember that. Didn't work very well for a couple of reasons:
- There were so many games out there on such a wide variety of platforms at the time that the likelihood of seeing anything particularly interesting was slim.
- Our video didn't do a particularly good job of pausing. There was so much noise on the screen when paused that the Datablast was unreadable.
People forget how advanced teletxt was for the 70s (Score:5, Insightful)
A system of realtime transmission of embedded digital data with live updates and multicolour graphics on a TV before most home computers with the computer actually built into the TV (not a set top box!) was pretty much bleeding edge for the time. Its was truly a quantum leap in home technology when up until that point when most people in the UK still didn't even have colour TV sets.
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Actually, it was intially. A great big box you could probably put your telly on rather than vice versa. I'm struggling to remember who made the early ones - they had one at the science museum. It wasn't a firm that usually sold to the public, more commercial/education as I remember.
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No reason to stop playing... (Score:2)
Get an amateur radio licence, and build your own encoder:
http://www.qsl.net/zl1vfo/teletext.htm [qsl.net]
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One of the great things about the Internet is now we have easy access to stuff like the teletext spec - stuff that was always public, just really hard to find. And when you did find it, most of it was in Dutch.
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Now that CEEFAX is dead, modern services like Twitter and Tumblr can help enrich our lives with more up to date, if slightly editorialized, news.
They can enrich YOUR life. Many old people only know how to use CEEFAX or TELETEXT and for them it's as basic and essential as internet is for us. What does it cost to keep it alive? Is it worth the money to shut off people who will never use internet, and push them out of current society a little more?
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What does it cost to keep it alive? Is it worth the money to shut off people who will never use internet
You're not really paying attention are you? All working UK TVs** now have digital text, which is not really any more difficult to use that CEEFAX for non-internet users; the main index page numbers are even the same on digital text as they were on CEEFAX. Noboby has been 'shut off'.
**With a few exceptions in cheap hotels etc., can't be bothered to explain why.
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Since we don't have Ceefax here I only have experience with Teletext but from what I see old people only use it when they don't have a TV program guide at hand. Also it's so bloated with ads for dubious phone services these days that it's really worthless except as a way of getting subtitles. A newspaper is more detailed, comfier and more convenient (because portable) and often comes with a TV guide as well. And that TV guide covers all channels, not just the one you've called the Teletext up on.
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Also it's so bloated with ads for dubious phone services these days that it's really worthless except as a way of getting subtitles.
No ads on CEEFAX.
And that TV guide covers all channels, not just the one you've called the Teletext up on.
CEEFAX always had full listings for all of the analogue channels, and I think it had them for digital channels as well.
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CEEFAX has been switched off because analogue TV has been switched off. Anyone with a digital TV can get a very similar service on BBC Red Button, and anyone without a digital TV doesn't have TV anymore.
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Now that CEEFAX is dead, modern services like Twitter and Tumblr can help enrich our lives with more up to date, if slightly editorialized, news.
Ceefax news came from the BBC and could be believed. The brainless mind wank that comprises most of twitter is just digital wallpaper.
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Ceefax news came from the BBC and could be believed. The brainless mind wank that comprises most of twitter is just digital wallpaper.
https://twitter.com/BBCNews [twitter.com]
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The brainless mind wank that comprises most of twitter is just digital wallpaper.
That's like saying that eBay sucks because the last seller ripped you off. I hope you see the error of your ways. Hint: twitter is just the facilitator. The content comes from, well, wherever you choose it to come from. If you read tabloids, must you also complain about them all the time?
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I still rely very much on the Teletext service of German stations
I'm confused. Wikipedia tells me that German analogue TV broadcasts were switched off in Germany in 2009.
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we all know how well pixel and askii art works on slashdot.
middle fingers galore!