How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead

Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by solidangle on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:10AM (#12247065)

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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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by anigbrowl on Monday August 08, 2016 @01:33PM (#12249439)

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.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by jpt4 on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @01:09AM (#12252745)

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.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by xorcist on Monday August 08, 2016 @03:24PM (#12250250)

Use Lynx (or Links)!

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by anthk on Monday August 08, 2016 @07:31PM (#12251528)

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

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by ptaipale on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:47AM (#12247272)

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.)

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by skrause on Monday August 08, 2016 @05:42PM (#12251084)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by cJ0th on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @10:40AM (#12254762)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by hugi on Monday August 08, 2016 @09:11AM (#12247418)

And Iceland:

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by ptaipale on Monday August 08, 2016 @11:45AM (#12248643)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by gpvos on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:03AM (#12247809)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by akeruu on Monday August 08, 2016 @11:53AM (#12248698)

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

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by gpvos on Monday August 08, 2016 @03:35PM (#12250318)

Good.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by Scarblac on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:16AM (#12247094)

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.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by vanderZwan on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:30AM (#12247170)

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.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by kalleboo on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:12AM (#12247883)

> 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.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by Yuioup on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:12AM (#12247075)

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.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by r3bl on Monday August 08, 2016 @04:26PM (#12250633)

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.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by gpvos on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:30AM (#12247168)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by vertex-four on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:37AM (#12247207)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by gpvos on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:09AM (#12247860)

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.

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by kalleboo on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @05:40AM (#12253470)

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...

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by RobertKerans on Monday August 08, 2016 @02:49PM (#12249993)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by skrause on Monday August 08, 2016 @05:49PM (#12251114)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by david-given on Monday August 08, 2016 @06:10PM (#12251207)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by gpvos on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @04:27AM (#12253282)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by throwawayReply on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @08:22AM (#12254016)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by cyxxon on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:52AM (#12247310)

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?

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by NietTim on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:45AM (#12248179)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by furyg3 on Monday August 08, 2016 @02:53PM (#12250022)

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

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by bartkappenburg on Monday August 08, 2016 @03:09PM (#12250132)

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...

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Re:How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead by azeirah on Monday August 08, 2016 @12:00PM (#12248771)

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

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