Teletext (UK)

» see teletext.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

teletext ltd was the commercial sibling to ceefax. same signal layer, same vertical blanking lines in the analogue tv carrier, different broadcaster and different business model. the bbc paid for ceefax out of the licence fee. teletext ltd had to sell page space, mostly to package-holiday firms. neither product reached turkey in any meaningful form.

the service took over the itv and channel 4 teletext slots on 1 january '93 when the previous franchise holder oracle lost the licence at midnight on new year's eve '92. oracle had run since '75 as the commercial counterpart to ceefax. teletext ltd was a consortium fronted by associated newspapers (the daily mail parent) with philips and media ventures international as the other founders. it eventually ended up under a&n media inside the daily mail and general trust umbrella.

i was not paying attention to british tv text in those years but the cultural shape of the service is easy to reconstruct. holiday booking on page 200 was the killer app. teletext holidays moved more package holidays in the late 1990s than anyone wanted to admit, the model was that you watched the page cycle through cheap deals to ibiza or the canaries or lanzarote, you wrote down the reference, you phoned the agent. that single workflow paid for the editorial team that produced everything else.

the service went dark on 15 december '09. ofcom formally revoked the licence on 29 january '10 and later fined teletext £225,000 for ending the service before the licence period was up. the freeview epg pulled the entry on 21 june '10. the analogue switch-off was already rolling across the uk and the digital teletext replacement was a thin one. nobody really wrote an obit because the cultural memory of teletext had already moved to ceefax as the named one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually worked ~

the technical layer was the same as ceefax. teletext ltd published pages encoded in the world system teletext format. itv viewers got them through the same vbi lines in the analogue itv signal. you typed three digits on the remote, the carousel cycled, your page came up in eight to thirty seconds depending on depth. the editorial difference was the page allocation, page 100s were itv news headlines, 200s were holidays, 300s were sport, 400s were tv listings, 500s and up were a mix of horoscopes and classified ads.

the business model was the magic, in those days. teletext ltd sold the page space. holiday firms bought the deal pages on a rolling lease, then pushed reference numbers viewers could phone. classifieds bought the back of the carousel. tv listings were cross-promo with the itv schedules. the bbc never had to do any of this, which is why ceefax read like a newsroom and teletext ltd read like the back of a paper.

~ what it carried in the daily slot ~

the 200s page range was the cultural anchor. teletext holidays operated as a near-monopoly in the uk discount package holiday market for most of the 1990s. the way people in the uk picked a winter sun trip was to put the tv on text, wait for page 200 to cycle, write down the price for thomson or airtours, ring the number. the package-holiday industry restructured itself around this single page in the late 1990s.

the rest of the service was reading-the-paper-on-the-tv. tv listings on the four-channel grid. football scores updated live on saturday. weather, lottery, classifieds, horoscopes. on really though, ceefax did the same things with a bbc-newsroom voice. teletext ltd did them with a tabloid voice (close enough). neither survived the moment when broadband-internet booking made the holiday section pointless.

~ the postmortem ~

the holiday business migrated to the web during the 2000s. the same deal pages were now on lastminute.com or expedia or the holiday firm's own site, you could see all the dates, you could pay online. the carousel-wait felt slow after broadband. by 2008 the page-200 revenue had collapsed and the parent dmgt was looking at the service as a loss.

this part you had to be in the uk for, and i honestly was not. teletext ltd announced on 15 december '09 that it was ending its public services. ofcom formally revoked the licence the following january and imposed the fine in may. the freeview entry stayed in the epg as a dead listing until 21 june '10 when it was pulled. the holidays brand was bought out separately, ran as teletext holidays online for another decade or so until that too went under in 2021. the parent text-on-tv product was already a memory by then.

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