Ceefax switch-off

[Sebastian Cobb]

but so you may've come across softel's "oliver" equipment then, which bastardised teletext to deliver "pages" of opt-out control to cable operators & sundry rebroadcasters wishing to insert their own adverts or programming.

Our live streams use something like this. The (yospace) encoders can read the matId then post it back to our API which then tells it whether to show the streams or a blocking slate (I wrote that bit).

It must go out over the air as it worked on our now defunct second channel; because that was managed by comux the encoder was fed by a sky box and a HDMI to SDI converter. Someone in MCR leant on the remote one day and we ended up streaming the planner until someone noticed.

[Huxleys Babkins]

No, but I remember them doing something like that with a computer game on Live and Kicking and I commented on the voice recognition and my dad pointed out that it was more than likely just a human controlling a joypad.

Yeah, they did something similar on CBBC in the summer holidays. Something with a caterpillar, I think. You'd guide it around a maze, eating apples. Can't remember if the instructions were vocal or touchtone.

CITV also had T.I.G. (Totally Interactive Gameshow), the presenting debut of Gail Porter who was, for some inexplicable reason, calling herself "The Jeepster". That was touchtone as far as I can recall.

Going back to Teletext, I remember a show called Watch This Space, a cringe-inducingly trendy magazine show on Sunday afternoons, Channel 4, where you could call in and leave messages that were displayed in Teletext like a chatroom and the presenters would sometimes interact with the messages. A bit like Twitter but in 1995 and somehow even more shit. I recall someone once leaving a message that said "Emma Lee you are my wife!" an hour before broadcast and the message just sat there. That episode started with a cold open where she just fucking laid into the poor cunt. I can only presume they'd been told they'd been cancelled and they just felt like venting on one of the very few viewers they had.

[JesusAndYourBush]

No, but I remember them doing something like that with a computer game on Live and Kicking and I commented on the voice recognition and my dad pointed out that it was more than likely just a human controlling a joypad.

I don't think there was ever any pretension that that was anything other than a human controlling it.  The teletext thing I was talking about was controlled by commands like 'yes' and 'no'.  I can't for the life of me remember what the game was, but it'd have to have been something like a really simple text adventure.

[Sebastian Cobb]

My main memory of teletext was putting the football vidiprinter on one of the tellies in the bookies so people would leave me alone, the bookies did actually display the scores but they were about 10 minutes behind as they were the same ones that went to the bet settlement systems and needed to be confirmed/ratified.

[a duncandisorderly]

Around the same time another channel (maybe a satellite channel) had a similar telephone-based thing.  A kind of messageboard/chatroom type thing.  Like the other one, you called a number and it gave you your own temporary teletext page.  You left your message by pressing numbers on the telephone dial.... An early form of trolling.

we definitely had something like that on one of the Mtv channels, mid-90s I'd guess. I honestly can't remember the exact mechanism, but I suspect that at least some of the time, there was an answering machine & some poor spod transcribing, & this would've been when Mtv was pan-euro, so any number of accents & qualities of english to deal with.

I remember one night, during Ray Cokes' show.... one of my jobs was to replenish the paper rolls in the on-set fax machine, which viewers would send messages & cartoons to during the show (1993, this was), & sometimes this involved me ducking under the live camera to get to the thing, right in the middle of the set... sometimes people would send faxes addressed to me, which Ray would read out.  'duncan the fax-man'. one twat even drew a cartoon of me with an out-of-control roll of paper. as fucking if.

anyway, one night we got a fax from some bloke in johannesburg, claiming to be watching the show. the next morning, I showed the fax to our head of Network Development, a very abrasive ex-BT engineer from leicester whose job it was to work with all the satellite & cable platforms taking our signal, & who spearheaded the whole expansion of viacom.
he pronounced this impossible &, grabbing the fax from me, rang the bloke's phone number. he then demanded that the bloke read him some teletext pages from out of the normal mag range (so I know we could edit the pages in the 700s- I saw it done) & then fax us a copy of a newspaper front-page.
we later worked out that astra 1A had a sort of hypercardioid footprint over northern europe, which was achieved with the side-effect of a small rear lobe that skipped right over the main body of africa & landed in the far south. matey had a dealership & a 4.5M wok in his back garden. we had to make sure (legal reasons) that he wasn't redistributing us locally & undercutting multichoice or whoever.

I miss all that analogue crap. digital video is mostly shit by the time it reaches the consumer, & it's largely because of greed, not technology.

[petril]

have some nice, fond memories of coming home from uni for Christmas, just in time for the Learning Zone to fuck off for two weeks, and being slightly under the influence but staying up to catch the start of PFC. BART first, then disco Star Wars, then a run through all the classics before dozing off. Was around the same time BBC2 went through a phase of inventing Dave by having a big block of old comedy repeats late at night. Got me through those holidays.

[pigamus]

CITV also had T.I.G. (Totally Interactive Gameshow), the presenting debut of Gail Porter who was, for some inexplicable reason, calling herself "The Jeepster". That was touchtone as far as I can recall.

Well her initials are GP, maybe it's that.

[Twed]

cheers, both. when we had outsourced teletext data to insert into VBI using a databridge on the outgoing analogue lines, I used to worry that the data would gradually out-run the buffers in the databridge, but it didn't seem to have any deleterious effects. after the migration to DVB, it was up to the encoders & the multiplex to make sure all the data was time-stamped.

but so you may've come across softel's "oliver" equipment then, which bastardised teletext to deliver "pages" of opt-out control to cable operators & sundry rebroadcasters wishing to insert their own adverts or programming. this was placed on line 21, usually only on one field (normal teletext varied quite a bit, but we'd generally fight the case for at least two lines on each field for the sake of robustness in the analogue domain.... less important in DVB, but sometimes a statmux system will dump bits of payload opportunistically & if the text is important- there's a quota to be met for HOH subs, for instance- you might double up on the lines again). the softel kit was made of normal teletext tech, so to stop normal TVs decoding it & displaying break data to viewers, the eight or nine clock cycles at the start of the line were inverted to stop the domestic decoder from trying to read them. in the case of cable ops trying to decode this data, the precise timing & the number of clock cycles was more critical than for normal teletext.
ah but all this is a good while ago....

I was just posting meaningless jargon for a laff, but I did work for one of Softel's competitors in the mid-00s (digital TV, dying age of Teletext) and was peripherally involved in writing into that sweet, sweet VBI. We used to do all sorts of things with the VBI too, a lot of it not making it into the broadcast itself but used for internal stuff (even with secondary data channels available I guess this stuff was done while legacy systems were still kicking around. Those being phased out coincided with the death of Ceefax switch-off, no doubt).

[Ambient Sheep]

I was just posting meaningless jargon for a laff...

Thank fuck for that.

That's what I thought initially, but then when Duncan appeared to take it seriously I got a bit worried that I was more out of touch with this stuff than I thought!

[a duncandisorderly]

his 'cheers' was just for joining in, tbh. most people glaze over when you start describing this stuff!

[petril]

probably the bleakest part of teletext was Job Finder. daft o'clock on Sunday morning, the desperate mode 7 appeal for chefs, HGV licences and forklift drivers. ITV were always bottom of the league for ver 'text

[buttgammon]

probably the bleakest part of teletext was Job Finder. daft o'clock on Sunday morning, the desperate mode 7 appeal for chefs, HGV licences and forklift drivers. ITV were always bottom of the league for ver 'text

Yes! I've been looking at some old Teletext/Ceefax on YouTube recently and these always make me shudder a little bit. I know the idea was that the jobseeker in question would record Jobfinder overnight and watch it back, but the general crapness of the jobs combined with the thought that some desperate bastard might have been staying up all night to look at them unsettled me somewhat.