Ceefax was known by everybody as the blocky old thing that takes forever to load, while the red button / BBCi was the modern looking thing
... that takes even longer to load.
Think it depends on the platform - and what kit you have (for either service).
Most modern TVs cache CEEFAX (aka WST) services so all the pages are stored in memory and the result appears to be very fast (after all - each page is 1k - as anyone who used a BBC Micro in Mode 7 will remember! - so storing every page is trivial these days). CEEFAX used to be pretty slow when your receiver didn't store pages, and had to wait for the specific page (and sub-page in some cases) to come round.
I think some DVB-T/T2 sets do this cacheing trick with MHEG5 now as well. My Windows Media Center loads Digital Text really quickly when I press Red. Sky boxes usually take forever... (Though AIUI Sky are moving from OpenTV middleware to a more Linuxy platform now?)
BTW - has anyone noticed how modern TVs don't have the full teletext buttons (Reveal, Time Text/Alarm, Double-height etc.)
Ceefax was known by everybody as the blocky old thing that takes forever to load, while the red button / BBCi was the modern looking thing
... that takes even longer to load.
Really? It's very fast on mine. Takes only a few seconds to come up.
Think it depends on the platform. Sky boxes (particularly early SD Digiboxes) can be very slow. Modern Freeview sets can be very quick. (But then the two services run on very different middleware)
In the 80s didn't BBC1 and BBC2 have their own CEEFAX decoders? I'm sure that on occasion they were both showing CEEFAX (different pages) at the same time.
There were times when BBC2 was showing PFC while BBC1 was showing Children's BBC, which included Phillip Schofield using CEEFAX to show the Top 40 chart rundown once a week. This always seemed to be live, with the clock running.
Nice of them to mention but I'm not really sure what the point of spending about 20 seconds on it was. "Something you've probably never used is being switched off this week"!