Text on Text

I've been on holiday for the last few weeks so appear to have missed the grand opening of ITV's new digital teletext service. It certainly kicks the preverbial crap out of it's channel four's digital service. Which doesn't make much sense considering they are created by the same company. Channel Four have had their Teletext(brand) provided teletext sevice for a couple of years without any noticabel updates. Where it has a cluttered and confusing layout of pale not-very-contrasting colours ITV has more reconizable Teletext colours. Dark blue, green and black with only a few pale colours. It also manages to be much quicker than it's channel four equivlent. It even has simlar numbers to it's old anolouge equivlent. May be the best digital teletext system around. BBC i repulses me for sevral reasons. It's pushy. If I want to read music reviews I have to listen to some ditsy bitch babble on about celebrities or watch clips of last weekends causualty and interviews with some Eastenders cast members. Why? God knows. It seems to know exactly what I want even more than me. The other reason is the very fact it's called BBC i. It has ideas above it's station. It avoided in label of teletext, digital teletext or even the legendary label of Ceefax. This is despite the fact the vast majorty of users will be pressing a button that says text to access it.

I must admit it's a decent service though as most of the content is written for Ceefax and copied onto BBC i. Of course Ceefax is still quicker at updating. ITV's digital Teletext seems to work the same way. So though I havn't used it that much yet I'm pretty impressed. If I were to give it at least a provisional mark it would be 7.5/10. You may wonder if that means I think it's even better than traditional teletext. Put simply, no it does not. Traditional teletext still has the edge it flexability, ease of access and on the most part, speed.

This launch does mean that every terrestail station in the UK (bar Five which still can not be recieved through vast swaifs of the country on anolouge, including my own little hovel) has a digital teletext service as well as an anolouge one. I'm not sure that actually means anything apart from more things to look at for my blog. Eventully it may cause a decline in the standards of anolouge teletext due to lack of advertising and viewer interest. Indeed it could even spell the end for traditional anolouge teletext services before the anologe signal swich-off, sheculded for compleation in 2012.

Ultimatley I beleive all digital text currently lacks the depth, charm and soul that makes the traditional teletext intersting and special but a little more focus on teletext can only be a good thing, can't it?

Teletext feature of the day-News Flash-Page 150 on Ceefax,302 on ITV and 102 on channel four
With the events of recent days in London and other UK cities meant services like this have been very important and informative. With alot of rumors flying around a few sentecnces of solid facts are all that are really needed.


PS: Hopefully some pictures of ITV digital text later.