Mediavideo

» see mediavideo.mediaset.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Mediavideo went on air on 27 November 1997 from the Mediaset emission center at Segrate, outside Milan, and it was the commercial answer to a thing Italian state television already had. RAI ran Televideo. Mediaset ran three national channels and no text service, and after 1997 it ran one across all of them.

The service grew with the group. By the end it was being transmitted on Rete 4, Canale 5 and Italia 1, then on La5, Mediaset Extra, Iris, Italia 2, Boing and the news channel TGcom24. The numbering followed the convention every European teletext service used, because viewers had learned it on somebody else's platform and there was no sense in teaching them another: news in the low hundreds, sport from 200, economy and listings in the threes, out to page 513 at the far end.

What is strange about Mediavideo is how long it kept going. Most of the teletext services that are remembered fondly died in the 2000s or soon after, when their broadcasters went digital and decided the pages were a cost rather than a service. Mediaset kept transmitting into 2022. A viewer in Italy could still hold down 100 on the remote and wait through the rotation in the same year people were watching the same network's shows on a phone.

~ the case file ~

~ what was on the pages ~

Teletext in its late period was not competing with the internet and had stopped pretending to. What survived on Mediavideo were the things a page of fixed-width text does better than a website: a football score, a program start time, a lottery draw, the weather for tomorrow. These are small facts that want to be read in four seconds from across a room, and a remote control beats a browser at that every time.

I never saw a page of it. Italian commercial television was not something that reached Ankara, and Mediavideo was in Italian for an Italian audience with no reason to look outward. What makes the distance small is the format itself. A teletext page from Segrate and a teletext page from TRT look like the same object, because they are: the same character grid, the same seven colors, the same rotation you waited through while the numbers in the corner climbed. The content was foreign and the furniture was not.

~ removed in two stages ~

The end was administrative and nobody announced it. From August 2021 Mediavideo stopped appearing on the HD versions of Rete 4, Canale 5 and Italia 1. This is how teletext usually dies now. The high definition stream is a new encode on a new channel slot, somebody has to deliberately carry the old data layer across into it, and when that work does not get scheduled the pages quietly do not arrive.

For a few months the service survived only for viewers still watching the standard definition feeds, which by then meant older sets and older habits. On 14 January 2022 those went too, along with Iris and TGcom24, and that date is the end of the service. Twenty-four years, closed out by the same decision taken twice.

~ the part that outlived it ~

Mediaset's text operation predates the magazine by four years. It starts on 15 March 1993, during an episode of the telenovela Celeste on Rete 4, with subtitles for deaf viewers carried on a teletext page. That function kept running after the magazine around it was switched off, for another eleven months, until December 2022, when it was replaced by DVB subtitling. The accessibility service that had justified the carriage in the first place was the last thing still using it.

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