The BBC’s pioneering service Ceefax is to be switched off in 2012. Not bad for a service that recently celebrated its 35th birthday. (Thanks to Mike Brown, you can even spend An Evening With Ceefax, as it was in 1982…)

Most countries have their own text-based services, which are delivered in a few spare lines of analogue TV signal space. Sadly, as analogue signals are switched off, these services are disappearing. They’re all based on technology developed by the BBC in the early 1970s, its main impact was making subtitling (aka closed captioning) accessible to a much greater audience (although “live” subtitling wasn’t flawless.) In the pre-open-Internet 1980s, there was even a teletext adapter for the BBC microcomputer.

Those without teletext adapters or teletext-capable TVs weren’t completely left out – before it went 24-hour, the BBC transmitted Pages from Ceefax during the night (and still does, when BBC News 24 is on BBC One…)

With European standards being based on the BBC’s, I remember living on the coast and picking up French, German and Dutch TV stations. Due to differences in the signal, I couldn’t hear the audio, but could see the video and even read the teletext!

Sadly, this is all going now. In 1993, ITV’s service ORACLE shut down, replaced by a consortium led by the owners of The Daily Mail newspaper – something not many teletext aficionados were keen on. On January 1st, 2010, their analogue service will shut down, leaving Ceefax as perhaps the last analogue TV teletext service in Britain (unless some satellite providers are still running theirs?)

Will the last teletext service please turn off the lights?

Tags: analogue TV, Ceefax, ORACLE, teletext, tv

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 07:03 and is filed under Retro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.