Text on Text

Acutul news on teletext today. Well, for anolouge televison. The signal will begin to be switched off in 2008. It will be done region by region until a complete turn off in 2012. This would spell the end for classic teletext in the UK. At the minute only 60% of people have any sort of digital televison and the figure is unlikley to increase massivly over the next few years as digital buying has probably peaked. I was wondering though could pirate televison stations be set up on an anolouge signal? Brodcasting equitment would become worthless and could be picked up cheaply. Even weak anolouge transmitters could be obtained cheaply. So then the question is, could pirate teletext be set up? Probably not. As teletext requires a good reception to be readable so only small areas would be likely to recieve a teletext ready signal. There are others options for the continunity of teletext including the internet. Call me a purist but I think putting TELEtext on the internet defeats the purpose somewhat. As the government havn't confirmed this yet it's not offical but it's very likely they will. Then again 2012 is 7 years away. Even if Labour wins the next election they wouldn't nessacerily be in power for the crucial date.

Teletext continues to thrive in other nations ,of course, where full digialisation( did I make that word up or just spell it wrong) is still some way away. Indeed I'm going to be having a look at another countries teletext system tomorrow or Friday. Not sure which one yet but I hope to make it a regular feature so they'll get mentioned. Cause you just know Armenia's proudest moment would be to have it's teletext service mentioned on an unread blog.

Teletext thing of the Day-Turner the Worm-c4
A very strange childrens text comic. It's aimed at pre-schoolers but I laughed at every scene. Maybe it was just the idea of seeing a worm potrayed as a hero in a text-based comic trying to save the world from some alien thing. I didn't pay much attention to the plot. Watch it if you can!