Teletext to end

It is with the pages you know exist, but when they launch new pages (such as the Premiership and Championship section) and give them rather bizarre 4-digit numbers, if you only ever visit the sections you know chances are (e.g. I skip the index 302 and go straight to 303/316 for football news/results) they'll be there for months before you realise they are. It's perhaps not the numbering itself which is the issue, but the promotion of content within the service itself.

Also I think a lick of paint for BBC Text is long overdue. The sport pages got a new look (although this now means all red button services are generic, rather than re-skinned for special events), but the rest is beginning to look tired. Nothing flash needed, but the )limited) service on Freesat looks clean and modern and it might be an idea to take that look to the BBC text pages on all platforms.

Has anyone else seen page 615?

Seems to be a leftover page from ITV1 West - either that or it's a page still in use despite the ancillary services being discontinued a few years ago...

And why am I seeing it in London?

I get it here in Meridianland. I suspect all the 'Chiswick' playout regions have it ?

The ITV/Channel 4 services will disappear as they are run by the same company, Teletext Ltd. The sad thing is that we won't even have a digital teletext version of this service or the website, it's all going. The thing is the owners of Oracle actually campaigned for teletext to have its own licence to broadcast, separate to TV. So even after they did all of that to secure teletext they lost out in the franchise bidding process to Teletext Ltd. Another reason for hating the 1990 Broadcasting Act which led to the end of my beloved Thames Television!!

Here are some memories of Oracle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zue9amTp3lk

Also if you go to page 107 they are shwoing some of the iconic pages from their past such as Turner The Worm and Bamboozle. However I must say that even though they are showing tv reviewer Sam Brady in their hall of fame he started on Oracle and I heard that he never even existed but was several people that wrote a TV review column under that pseudonym.

Random question but why did they never update the logo used on the analogue version of Teletext. They still use the blue/yellow one, even though the purple/white logo has been around a few years now.

Wouldn't the logo in Magenta look awful?

Teletext will start disappearing from 10am this morning.

http://www.channelonline.tv/channelonline_guernseynews/displayarticle.asp?id=471096

Just playing my last round of Bamboozle... poor old Bamber, he'll be out of a job now.

Still, after all these years he'll finally be able to stop wearing the same suit!

So at 10am this morning.. Teletext will..

'Press the RED button to end' .

It's been done before (pictures from MB21)

http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/cabsat/live.gif http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/cabsat/godtext-200-20010803-bg.gif

It's a shame that the Teletext closedown won't be like the Oracle closedown. Won't be able to view analogue TV until this evening and I feel that it would have been gone by then. Just wondering will Sbectel on S4C on Sky be gone aswell?

On Freeview at least no goodbye - just stripped anything of value from the menu and now it's basically linking to services like Holidays and their mobile updates, plus DirectGov and NHS Choices. Looks like it'll remain accessible via ITV/C4, which it just doesn't deserve - and possibly prevents any rival coming in. Surely OFCOM could put their 3% gifted spectrum up for auction to see if anyone else is interested.

I hope they learn the hard way that stripping away the unprofitable, but valued PSB elements, and keeping the commercial aspects isn't the way to go, and I'm in little doubt that services like Teletext Holidays and all their chat crap will see a decline in users now they're no longer linked to the service we used to know as Teletext.