TVNZ Teletext

» see tvnz.co.nz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The 1981 New Zealand Telethon raised money for the deaf, and part of what it bought was a teletext service. TVNZ Teletext went live on 1 February 1984, which makes New Zealand an early adopter of a format the BBC had only shipped commercially a few years before. The founding purpose was written into it from the start: get news and information onto a television screen in a form a deaf viewer could actually use.

What it grew into was the usual teletext sprawl, and the page map is the best surviving description of it. Indices ran 100 to 109 with news from 110 and weather at 140, then sport took the whole of 200 to 299, which tells you where the traffic was. Television listings sat at 301 with daily highlights at 331, business and travel filled the 400s including flight information, and lifestyle and horoscopes ran through the 500s. Lottery results had a single page, 555. Racing odds had 600 to themselves. Page 801 held the captions.

In December 2012 TVNZ announced the service would close, and it went off on 2 April 2013. The reasons given were the ones every broadcaster gave in this decade. The insertion equipment was old and expensive to keep running, the audience had shrunk, and anything teletext carried was a search away by then. The shrinking audience was partly a consequence of the aging equipment, since nobody had improved a page on the service since roughly 2006.

New Zealand teletext is a service I have no memory of and a format I do. Turkey had TRT teletext through exactly these years, and what transfers across every country that ran one is the physical grammar of it: the number typed blind on the remote, then the wait while the carousel came back around to your page. The pages were different everywhere and the waiting was identical.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ page 801 ~

Every other page on the service was a convenience that the web made redundant. Page 801 was not. Captions for recorded programming were the accessibility layer for New Zealand television, and they arrived through the teletext signal because that was the only channel available for carrying them.

When the analogue teletext stream went away the captioning did not die with it, because digital broadcast carries subtitles in its own stream. That is the detail that makes the 2013 shutdown a tidy one. The single function with a moral claim on continued existence had already been given a new pipe before the old one was cut.

~ telethon money ~

A national fundraising broadcast paying for a public information system is a very particular sort of origin. It means the service never had to justify itself commercially at launch, and it means the deaf community had a legitimate claim on it that lasted the full 29 years. It also means it was underfunded structurally from day one, because telethon money is capital and a teletext service is an operating cost.

That gap is visible in the equipment complaint TVNZ made in 2012. There was never a second telethon, and nobody found a line in the operating budget to replace what the first one had bought.

~ the day the pages stopped ~

The New Zealand Herald covered the announcement in December 2012 and there was no organized campaign against it, which is the difference between this and the Ceefax shutdown five months earlier in Britain. Ceefax died on 23 October 2012 with a broadcast countdown and a farewell page. TVNZ Teletext went off on 2 April 2013 and the record of it is a Wikipedia page listing the numbers.

Both were the same technology dying of the same causes within six months. One of them had 38 years of national memory attached and the other had 29. The memory is the thing that buys you an obituary.

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