Teletext to end

Who's to say they haven't?

I'm sure they have but it requires people to go to the top of hills to perform the work. It's not exactly urgent and as I say it's almost certainly not an illegal transmission as such

Yes, point taken, though by now I'd have expected to see the Crystal Palace transmissions cease, as Arqiva's local maintenance base is only a couple of miles away at Croydon.

There is the matter that some teletext decoders still require a full teletext page to be present in order to reliably decode the subtitle data. It might take time to arrange a new holding page on P100 supplied by either Arqiva, or the broadcasters.

There'll be no 'pulling' the service. Analogue relies on it for subtitles, As I've said before and seemingly it's been ignored the Digital runp Service too is ok as it's covered by alternative licences (see the list of licencees on the Ofcom site).

A simple commercial agreement with D3/4 for the bandwidth and transferring the rump PSB service (primarily the Racing service) across to one of the non PSB licences and the job's done.

P888 subtitles are the total responsibility of the broadcasters (ITV/STV/UTV/4/5) and inserted into the VBI at their relevant playout centres.

Teletext Ltd, are not, nor ever have been in any way responsible for the P888 data.

Teletext Ltd pages (the ones in question) are inserted into the VBI at the primary regional Tx sites. Apart from the P100/888 technical issue I mentioned in my last post, there is absolutely no connection or interaction between the services.

Why would Ofcom force them off air?

The position is that the regulated franchise has effectively been returned to Ofcom, and has now been formally cancelled by Ofcom. This required certain services, such as the news, and in return gave guaranteed bandwidth on DTT.

Any commercial service can continue, as long as Teletext can find someone to rent the bandwidth to them, and from the sound of it services such as the racing, holidays, and a few others will continue, fully licensed where necessary.

It might be the case that the equipment at each site is Teletext's and not Arqiva's of course

This would mean that it would require either the need for replacement equipment at each site, the addition of a page 100 from the broadcasters (they used to provide ancillary services so that shouldn't be that difficult) or the co-operation of Teletext to send out a blank magazine to replace their current ones

A significant number of modern TVs will not decode a teletext signal with just 888 subtitles - and in some cases can have even more dodgy issues.

Tivo had a similar issue (their UK PVR just used to record and re-insert page 888 data and ignore all other pages) and had to provide a second version of their software with no subtitle recording for owners of TVs that

Philips sets used to lock-up amazingly when fed a Tivo signal with p888 only...

Watching Crystal Palace analogue - p100 is refreshing with a slightly unfamiliar "scroll down" - are fewer lines now being used for the remaining pages?

Because to broadcast you need a license... and they don't have one any more.


Yes, they can continue to broadcast with a license on their commerical servcies which use bandwidth they've rented and paid for. But not on their PSB license with gives them bandwidth on analogue and their bit of the D3&4 MUX.

Looking tonight on Meridian, the remnants of their ancillary service is still there, with holding pages on 600 and 699, plus a leftover prog info page from HTV West ! on 615. Possibly the easiest method would be to reprogramme those to 1** pages, and update the content. I suspect the same generators/inserters handle 888 data anyway.

Was there ever a backup holding page that the VBI inserters would insert if the link to Teletext failed?

In the early days of Teletext Ltd (1993 onwards), the generators seemed to lack UPS back up. In my part of the world, Rowridge often suffered power interruptions. These were enough to cause the teletext generators at the Tx site to reboot, so straight after the transmitter came back up, selecting text would just bring up a blank P100. Gradually, over a few minutes the pages would reappear, and repopulate with characters. AIUI the page data was (is) sent from Teletext HQ in London, over ISDN lines to each of the primary tx sites.

By the way, while it's still there, take a look at P198 on C4 analogue

Interesting, shame the http link given (http://dtvaspxcp/docs/spypage) isn't external, yes I was sad enough to try just in case!

The page with the green transmitter abbreviations has been on there on various pages in various forms since 1993. I once had a sheet that Teletext sent out explaining what it all meant, basically it was the queue of updates to each of the 26 or so transmitters. IIRC the numbers would change colour and flash depending on the queue size and other error states.

The list of abbreviations used to use a mixture of transmitters - BLU, DIV, HEA etc and ITV company names (depending on if there was more than one site per ITV region) , now it looks like it's all transmitter names with a few extra outputs: HFR (Horseferry Road - Ch4), WAL(Wales presumably), CAN (?) and CH5