NexTView

~ the last words ~

NexTView was an electronic program guide for analog television, agreed in 1995 by the European manufacturers who were about to spend a decade building the sets that ran it. The transport was teletext, level 2.5, the same vertical blanking interval that had been carrying page 100 since the 1970s. What traveled in it was not formatted pages. It was a compact binary database of titles, start times and genre codes, standardized at ETSI as ETS 300 707 and ETS 300 708, and a television that understood the format could rebuild a searchable week of listings out of it.

On paper this was a good trade. A viewer with a NexTView set could ask for every film showing tonight, or for one genre across the next seven days, with no magazine and no set-top box in the way. Six manufacturers shipped compatible receivers, Philips and Sony among them, and the feature arrived as a line on the spec sheet rather than as a product anyone had to buy.

The data had to come from a broadcaster willing to give up capacity it could otherwise have sold, and that was always the weak joint. In Germany Kabel 1 relayed listings for around thirty-two networks. Swiss television ran a feed covering roughly thirty-seven, and because the Swiss teletext operation also handled the French-language channels, TV5 and M6 and Canal+ came in through the same door. Belgium and Austria were served off the same two feeds. The whole European service was never more than a handful of generous transmitters.

Turkey is on that list too. The provider table kept by nxtvepg, the PC client people used to read the stream off a tuner card, counts a Turkish feed carrying the TRT family at around seventeen networks. So the data was going out over channels I actually watched. Teletext I knew the way everyone with a remote knew it in the 1990s, holding a three digit page number and waiting for the rotation to come back around to you. Whether any set in the house could decode the layer sitting on top of that, I cannot tell you. It needed a receiver built for it, and nobody shopping for a television in Ankara was reading the spec sheet for an ETSI number.

~ the record ~

~ how the data got in ~

Teletext worked because analog television wasted a slice of every frame. The electron beam needed time to return from the bottom of the screen to the top, and during that gap the signal carried nothing a viewer could see. Broadcasters filled it with text. The bandwidth was tiny and the rotation was slow, which is why waiting for a page was part of the experience.

NexTView used the same gap but refused to spend it on human-readable characters. Pages are expensive when you are describing four hundred programs. A binary record for each one, with the title as text and everything else as codes, fit a week of a whole network bouquet into space that would otherwise have held a few dozen screens of formatted listings. The cost was that the data meant nothing without a decoder, so the format was invisible to any set that had not been built for it.

~ the slow subtraction ~

Nothing announced the end. 3sat stopped in 2003 and Euronews in 2004, RTL2 held on until 2006, and Kabel eins scheduled a shutdown for December 2010, postponed it, then went quiet anyway by 2012. TV5 Monde cut its two feeds on 9 July 2013. That left Swiss television alone, carrying a European standard by itself, and on 31 October 2013 it stopped too. Every one of those decisions was the same decision made separately: the audience had moved to digital receivers, where the guide came with the signal and cost the broadcaster nothing extra.

~ the client outlived the signal ~

nxtvepg is still there. It was written so a PC with a TV capture card could pull NexTView off the air and show the listings on a monitor, and it is online today at the same SourceForge address, with a working page describing what the format was and which providers carried it.

It does not read NexTView anymore, because there is nothing to read. The program now scrapes ordinary teletext listing pages and writes them out as XMLTV. That is a sensible job for a TV guide tool, and it is not the job the name refers to. The provider table it keeps is the clearest surviving record of who ever transmitted the format, maintained by a piece of software that lost its reason to exist and found another one.

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