Sky Text

» see skytext.sky.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Sky Text launched in 1985 on the analog satellite service then called Sky Channel, three years before Rupert Murdoch's four-channel Sky Television and five years before the merger with BSB. That makes it older than almost everything the company later turned into. It was teletext in the ordinary British sense: numbered pages of colored text and blocky graphics riding in the unused lines above a television picture, free to anyone whose set had a decoder in it.

For a while it was not even called Sky Text. In 1995 it was briefly renamed Fastext, and after the name changed back the word Fastext stayed sitting in the header row at the top of every page for years, which is what happens when a header template lives inside a broadcast encoder nobody wants to open.

It was a business as well as a service. In october 1997 Channel 5 launched its full teletext service, 5 Text, and Sky Text was contracted to run it. The operation producing Sky's own pages was therefore also producing a rival broadcaster's, an arrangement that is unremarkable inside teletext and looks strange from anywhere outside it.

Sky did not sell into turkey and there was no route to this thing from where I was, so what I know about page 200 is other people's account of it. The part I can speak to is the transmission model, which is stranger than anything the internet later managed. A teletext page is not fetched. The pages cycle past your television in a fixed loop hidden in the picture signal, and typing a number tells the decoder to wait until that page comes round again and catch it. You request nothing. You stand in the doorway and wait for the right thing to go past. In 1998 I was waiting on a 33.6k modem for a page that had at least been asked for.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

A digital version launched in december 2000 on Sky Digital, at first only inside the sports channels and readable even by people who had not paid for those channels. Then Sky shut off its analog satellite transmissions in june 2001 and the original teletext service went with them. A single combined version limped along until october 2001. On cable it continued in a reduced form whose entire content was horse racing information and bookmakers' advertising, which is what a text service turns into when nobody is defending it.

It got rebuilt rather than buried. August 2002 brought new navigation for the digital service. December 2004 put Sky Text on Freeview at channel 108, which meant every household with a digital box instead of only Sky subscribers, and that is the version most people in Britain actually remember. News sat on 102 and sport on 200, with a sport letters page at 459 that worked as a slow public forum years before anyone would have used the word.

~ what got buried with it ~

5 Text closed in 2011. Ceefax made its final transmission at 23:32:19 on 23 october 2012, timed to the last region completing digital switchover, and it got the send-off a thirty-eight-year-old national institution earns. Sky Text was still broadcasting the next morning, and the morning after that, for another twelve months.

That extra year is the interesting part. Sky Text outlived the iPhone by six years and the iPad by three. It sat on Freeview 206 among the shopping channels, updating football scores for an audience nobody was measuring, long after every reader it had left was carrying something better in a pocket. Teletext did not lose an argument here. It was left running until somebody got round to switching it off.

~ the day it died ~

On 19 september 2012 Sky Text was moved from Freeview 108 down to 206, one month before Ceefax ended, which in television terms is a notice period. It stopped broadcasting on 30 october 2013. The number stayed in the channel guide as an empty slot until 3 december, when that went too, and skytext.sky.com stopped answering.

Twenty-eight years, from an analog satellite feed that predated the company most people mean when they say Sky, down to a dead entry in a menu. Nobody wrote it up. There is no final-page screenshot circulating the way the Ceefax one does. The last teletext service in Britain went off the air and the record of it amounts to one line in a timeline.

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