RTÉ Aertel

» see rte.ie/aertel as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

at 13:45 on 12 october 2023 the last aertel page went off the air and what was left on the screen was a teletext clock with nothing behind it. it had been counting since 1987. nobody switched the clock off, it just ran on for a while over an empty service, which is a more honest ending than a farewell page would have been.

rté launched aertel on 22 june 1987, after tests in 1985 and a six week experimental broadcast in early 1986. it carried news on 103, business on 130, share prices on 140, the lottery on 150, weather on 160. subtitles lived on 888 and that number is burned into a whole country's muscle memory. pages were updated between 10am and 10pm, and overnight rté two ran a rotation of them in vision under the name nightscreen, so the text service became the thing that filled the hours when television had stopped.

it was called simply aertel until september 2003, when rté put its own prefix on it along with everything else it owned. rté.ie spent years wrapping aertel's output straight into web pages, which means the irish national broadcaster's early news website was a teletext feed wearing html. the service was also on wap, for anyone who remembers what that felt like.

i was never in range of the signal. aertel was eleven years old by the time i first got online in turkey, and my internet arrived by dialing a phone number and waiting. aertel did the opposite thing. it pushed the same pages at every television in ireland at once, with no account to make and nothing to pay. that model lost, and it took thirty six years to lose.

~ the dossier ~

~ the day it died ~

rté announced the closure on 2 october 2023 and gave it ten days. the dismantling on the morning of the 12th is documented in unusual detail because people sat and watched it. most magazines came off through the late morning, leaving around thirteen pages on aertel 1 and fourteen on aertel 2. page 700, which had been carrying the explanation for the closure, was pulled early, and fragments of it leaked into page 100, which by then was scrolling through its own magazine every two seconds and throwing coding errors on both channels.

by 13:15 everything except the subtitles on 888 was gone, and at 13:22 aertel 1 vanished entirely, leaving both channels on a single aertel 2 page 100. at 13:45 that went too. a service can end with a press release or it can end by visibly falling apart on screen in front of the people who used it, and this one chose the second.

~ the long tail ~

the strange part is how hard it was to kill. the terrestrial analogue switch-off in 2012 should have finished it and did not, because aertel kept going on satellite. virgin media's analogue switch-off in 2019 took another chunk and it kept going. in april 2018 rté had to formally ask the minister for communications for permission to merely reduce the service, since a significant change to aertel was a legal matter and not an editorial one. the journal's headline on that story was that hundreds of thousands of people still used it.

the internet version faded first. aertel was on rte.ie in full for years, and from september 2019 the aertel homepage there stopped being a teletext mirror and became a list of links into the rest of the site, which is what a redirect looks like when nobody wants to admit it is a redirect. the broadcast service outlived its own website by four years. when the closure was announced in november 2019 as part of a cost-cutting round that also took two hundred jobs and scrapped digital radio stations, the42 published a requiem for aertel and for page 220. it then took until october 2023 for the thing to actually stop.

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