Teletext to end

And it's gone. Now just a basic menu with page numbers for Teletext holidays.

Very sad to see it go. Another great triumph for Ofcon.

Not really. Analogue teletext has a much smaller viewerbase than in the pre-digital days - with very few analogue TVs being used as the main (and in many cases secondary) viewing platforms.

AIUI Teletext UK couldn't pay the commercial rate for their portion of Digital 3/4 spectrum and make a business out of it - and I don't think that it has been argued that the service has huge public service value, particularly with widening web access.

Analogue teletext was effectively piggybacked on existing unused capacity (vertical blanking) and didn't reduce video or audio capacity whereas digital teletext uses exactly the same capacity as video and audio streams, and with Freeview bandwith being a very valuable commodity these days, it just didn't make financial sense.

Ofcom make many dubious decisions - their worst IMHO was not to grant any extra RF capacity for HD on terrestrial - but I can see the logic of the teletext position.

A slideshow of the final days of Teletext on analogue..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwmMThdtGzg

Surely someone's managed to capture it in a better form than a series of photos of a TV screen?

You're right - it's very pixellated.

As the 3% was gifted though, and they already had pretty much a full service on Freeview, I don't see the argument over bandwidth other than Teletext wanted more space for non-PSB elements.

Also the net argument is a non-starter for me - they're too completely different mediums and by the time you've booted up your PC you could have read through most of the days big stories on Teletext during the ads.

Why wait to boot a PC when you could check the news on your phone?

I always thought the issue with digital text was they overcomplicated it. They made it too graphically fancy and over the top at the expense of speed and that was exactly the advantage teletext had, it was FAST, especially on TV's that cached it.

Whilst teletext was superior to BBCi in many ways it was still sluggish, and that's probably the fault of the underpowered boxes rather than the system but that doesn't matter when you simply want to check the headlines.

Having said that I also wonder how teletext expect to keep holidays running without the news service to plug it with. Surprised they didn't just roll up what was left of the company instead of going into what will likely be a slow death.

Why don't Ofcom give the 3% spectrum vacated by Teletext to the BBC so that they can put back some of the red button services that have been sacrificed for Freeview HD?

Would it be sufficient, or am I talking out of my a*se?

The latter probably, though perhaps that 3% could be the difference between having 8 or 9 channels on the PSB2 mux.

It's quite sad to finally see the service gone and most the pages blank, to think how much I used to use it and play Bamboozle pre-internet.

On a related note I have noticed that on Anglia it seems P615 of the old regional service has been accidentally left up with ITV1 West branding.

As for screenshots I managed to grab a selection from P105-109 before the closure. When I get the chance I'll upload them somewhere and post them here.

Yep, see posts 74 and 75