Text on Text

Lack of interest and lack of time has prevented me from posting for a while, though you'll note that a now have a teletext advert floating around the front page. Was on You-Tube for some reason.

Quite a bit of news. I've forgotten most of it. The pretense of professionalism has long been dropped I'm afraid. The anoluge(if this keeps coming up I'm going to have to learn to spell anoluze) switch-off, or teletext armageddon if you will, has been mentioned again, this time in more paniced tones. About a third of people know it's happenening, about a quater know when and pensioners are presumably too buzy sending their right-wing view points about how the younger people should give them money,money,money to teletext to actully find out about their TV's(which is real terms means only about ten precent know.)

Planet Sound, one of my favorite teletext pages and probably the best music magazine in the UK, has had a few exculisives of late. Not sure how but quite a few album and tour dates get annonced there first. Came up in my Google "teletext" news alert yesterday where the NME credited an exculive about Kylie Minouge to the humble teletext section. Strangly though, when i clicked on the link I found it had been changed from "Eavis told Planet Sound, music section on channel four teletext" to "Eavis told assiocated press. Tried to put that in bold using HTML, might not work. It actully was in blod though. Odd. I reckon they felt threatened. If so, rightly so-the NME is the musical equivlent of etheir a very bad tabliod or some very good toilet paper. But with more adverts, genrally placed beside a review were they lambast a band for "Selling out." And if your really lucky, next week they'll sing the bands praises and put them on the cover cause they sell alot( see Oasis,Babyshambles, Richard Ashcroft). Quite a rant there. It's less acceptable to off on one in real life though os I have to do here.

Back to teletext news. Ole teletext had quite a bit of mainstream media coverage of late as a survey revealed that out of the six and half million people who regulary use subtitles, only one million actully have hearing difficulties. I was a bit shocked my the scale, but it's certainly pretty common. I know alot of people who do it and do it myself on occasions. Theres an article on it on the BBC website I'll try and link to. Theres something mezmerizing about being able to read what is being said on screen. I think it makes you enjoy the film/prgramme more too, as your paying more attention to whats going on. Of course live subtitling, as used in News and most sporting events is mor entertaining than imformative. Vast chunks of speech cut or edited so the poor subtitler has the vaugest chance of keeping up, words completly mis-spelt. At the beginning, nearly all programmes were done like this, but realising how impossible this was they changed it so most programmes are suntitled in advance, keeping beautiful time with those moving pictures.

Maybe the most interesting news on the teletext in the past few days though is this:

"The most interesting features(of new digital radios), though, are the text functions, which go by the names of textSCAN and Intellitext.The former lets you pause and control the lines of text you get from DAB broadcasts, so you won’t miss writing down a website or song title.Some broadcasters are now beefing up this information to give you sports news and headlines, and Intellitext gives you on-demand access to all of these updates, like a radio version of Teletext."

Teletext on radio? Two dying mediums brought into the digital age as one? I like it. I havn't seen one in action but I have been wanting to get a digital radio for a while and they are a bit cheaper now. I also love the name Intellitext. Crucilly though, this looks like it will be more like traditional teletext than it's akward younger "look at my video clips there CLAASSSSS" digital brother. Obviously it'll take a while before it has the depth and beautifullt pointlessness and neglect attached to it that the televison version has, but it's got to start somewhere. A new birth then for teletext. Which is handy cause no-ones aware of the impending death.