What happened to red button services?

I remember Playjam and "beat the meat"

I used to go on Sky Gamestar all the time as a kid such as Beehive Bedlam, Tom & Jerry, the Disney games & Word Search.

There was Sky Sports Active as well of course. I remember being really excited about it coming and annoyed that our Amstrad Digibox took a while to get the update to actually use it a couple of weeks after launch.

In the end it was gimmicky really, only useful in my view in the following ways:

*Highlights during the football if you missed anything
*Fanzone was sometimes entertaining and I think lasted even after Active ended
*Being able to see the cricket score cards, runrates and various statistics on demand was a nice feature too.

Some videos of it:




Sky News Interactive I miss just for allowing viewers to stay with a press conference, event or Parliament after the main Sky News had cut away from it.

Brief video of it here including a live feed broadcast by mistake:

I know you posted this at half past midnight, but surely you did notice that it's been (badly) edited, didn't you?

I remember when interactive TV was going to be the next big thing...then it never took off.

I remember ordering domino's pizza though the Virgin box a couple of times though. With the show clunky on screen keyboard.

Did the "interactive card" slot on Sky digiboxes ever get used?

I think they might be a while before they switch off BBC red button extra feed for sport etc because they will remain a fair amount of people without a connected tv and/or internet access for quite some time. Anyone who has never used the internet at home now is unlikely to ever start doing so.

Yes I see that now! Was watching it on a small screen. It shows a few seconds of the real Sky News Active I suppose though!

When the profile picture is a Minion, surely you must've questioned.


I usually remembered using the red button services to play games on Sky Gamestar. Funny thing is that sometimes you'd run the parents phone line bill right up. Whoops.

No. I'm not even sure what it was supposed to be for, perhaps a payment card for the home shopping services?


It was removed from the Sky+HD STBs onwards.

The BBC Red Button channel is pretty useful imo, for what I use it for (often to split screen snooker matches so I can watch two at once). It's also more convenient because you can still use various elements of your STB without being blocked by the blue button to exit. Hopefully they don't remove it and just keep it around since it still serves some purpose, especially for sport. Maybe they will rename it to BBC Entertainment and only broadcast live events from things like Sport, Music and the Arts as and when needed.

I remember Sky Vegas, Poker and Games being on sky interactive but were taken down a while ago and judging by the amount of interactive tv features on tv boxes, I think it's more or less dying.

Sounds like fun for the whole family.