Austext

~ the obit ~

The founding dates do not agree and the disagreement is ordinary for this technology. TV Tonight, reporting the closure in 2009, says Seven began test transmissions in 1977 with live services from 1982 in Brisbane and Sydney. Wikipedia puts the tests in 1979 and dates the regular service to 4 february 1980, with the genuinely useful pages arriving in 1982. Both accounts agree on the part that matters: there was a long stretch of transmitting something before there was anything worth reading, which is how broadcast data services always began.

By the mid-eighties Austext was national. Seven carried it and the regional affiliates relayed it, Prime and Southern Cross among them, so a household in a country town got the same page numbers as a household in Sydney. The index sat on page 100. Underneath it sat the news and finance pages, with the Bureau of Meteorology weather beside them. Further along were the television guide and a national TAB index for the racing, then the lottery results and the horoscopes for whoever came in for those. Closed captioning went out on page 801.

On 14 july 2009 Seven announced the service would end at the close of september. The statement acknowledged that Austext had loyal supporters and regretted the inconvenience, which is the register these announcements always use. The reason given was equipment: the hardware was original 1970s technology that had reached the end of its useful life, and Austext carried no advertising, so there was no case for buying new. It went off on 30 september 2009. Captions continued on 801 as before.

By 2009 I had broadband at home in Turkey and a phone that would tell me the weather, so a teletext page was not a thing I was ever going to reach for a remote to find. That is the honest position, and it is also the point. A service does not run to 2009 on 1970s hardware because the technology is good. It runs that long because a specific group of people kept using it after everyone else stopped, and when Seven finally did the arithmetic, those people were the ones who lost something. The comments under the closure notice were mostly from them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was on it ~

The content mix is a decent record of what an Australian household wanted checked quickly in 1990. Racing had a national TAB index, which in Australia is not a niche interest, and the weather came in as a feed from the Bureau rather than being typed by anybody. The rest was what you would check in under a minute and then leave, tonight's TV guide and the lottery numbers, plus a share price for anybody who was watching one.

None of it was interactive in any sense a modern reader would accept. You pressed three digits and the page arrived when the carousel next carried it. The whole service was one-way, one page at a time, and its editorial staff had been cut back years before the end, with pages fed automatically out of other systems. By 2009 much of Austext was being generated rather than written.

~ the last page ~

The closure notice ran on the service itself in the final weeks, which produced the small indignity of viewers writing in to say the warning about the shutdown had taken over their screen and they could not clear it off their set-top box. A text service telling you it is about to die, on the page where you used to check the temperature, and no way to dismiss it.

Seven had a second reason it did not put in the statement, and it was digital television. Teletext rides in the vertical blanking interval of an analog broadcast, and the analog switch-off was already scheduled. Datacasting was supposed to take over the job on digital, and Australia had been promised that for years by 2009. Most of it never showed up in a form anybody used.

~ who it was actually for ~

Page 801 is the part of this grave that should be read twice. Closed captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers went out through the same teletext system, under the Supertext branding when the Australian Caption Centre produced it, and when Austext died the captions did not. Seven made a point of saying so in the announcement, because that was the part of the service with an audience that could not simply go and look somewhere else.

It is a strange inversion for a dead product. The commercial content went away because a browser did all of it better and nobody was paying for the pages. The accessibility function, the thing that had been carried along on the same infrastructure without ever being the reason for it, was the piece worth keeping. Twenty-nine years of a service, and what outlived it was page 801.

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