Teletext sign 10 yr deal with ITV

Teletext has announced today they have signed a 10 year deal to provide text services for ITV.

Teletext on ITV will launch on Freeview and Digital Satellite this summer, offering news, sport and local information. It will be available on the ITV channels by pressing TEXT. No news on if it'll be available in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The similar service on Channel 4 is very good - especially the programme support section for C4. They also provide the analogue pages for C4, so with most of the ITV Text p600 services ceasing in the last couple of weeks, I expect this deal also includes something similar for the analogue ITV.

Talking of Teletext on 4 - on Freeview you can only access it via the Text button, though last summer the red button took you straight to the Big Brother pages. How does is work on Sky, where C4 have additional content. Is Teletext available via "Text", with other services via the red button.

They only annoyance for me on the Sky version is when you change page numbers the quarter screen flicks to blue for a second. If they could sort that out it would be great.

Channel 4 have their own red button service on Digital Satilitte, I think it's provided by Sky, and so contains links to games etc and Big Brother when Big Brother's on air, I think they've also recently started to do an interactive service for Channel 4 racing.

The only thing that I don't like about the Channel 4 digital service is the fact that they don't provide TV Plus, when it's a must see on Analogue, also the games like bamboozle, etc aren't provided.

Plus as has been said the screen does flick. Perhaps they should look at a bridge idea like BBCi's.

Also why will it take so long?
Surely it's just a matter of uploading the same style and format as Channel 4's with editorial changes like the logo and programme information onto ITV's space on the satilitte, or something like that.

What do people think the chances are of ITVplc buying Teletext at some point in the future? would they be interested?
Would there not be some cost savings in having one team of people looking after Teletext, itv.com and the itv regions websites (in the same way that teletext provides regional content).

I don't think Teletext is that important to ITV Plc - It probably doesn't make that much money, and I doubt ITV Plc would benifit much from it.

Media Guardian has a report on this today: http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1387211,00.html

What most interests me about this is that it is going to be available on the ITV News Channel.
Can someone explain how this would work? Because doesn't the news channel come straight from Greys Inn Road with ITV1, 2 & 3 come from the play out department in the London Studios?

So how will the teletext work, will it be played out from the two locations, would the News Channel be played out from TLS, or will they play out the teletext service from TLS that gets added to the news channel?

It will be nice for the news channel to have a service for viewers to use to get other news, even if it isn't an active service (though it would be nice for ITVi to create one now that it's going interactive), they can refer to it and the website.

It would be nice for the website to get an overhaul too, but then again what are the chances!

Playout, transmission etc for the ITV News Channel is handled by NTL [AFAIK this is still the case - can anyone confirm] - a throwback to the days when NTL were a partner in the ITN News Channel.

I would imagine that eventually it will be handled along with the rest of the ITV channels by ITV plc SPC.

Would Teletext's owners want to sell it?