The internet has finally bumped off Teletext, the Associated Newspapers text-based TV information service that revolutionised on-demand services before we’d even got our hands on the world wide web. Switch off is scheduled for 2010, two years earlier than planned, but I’m surprised it’s lasted out this long to be honest.
I wasn’t born when it was first launched as Oracle in 1974, but remember Teletext well as a student. Lots of us didn't have the luxury of a laptop or even a home PC back then but you could pick up the remote and get snippets of info on just about anything – the latest news, sports results, horoscopes, holidays, lonely hearts, TV guide, gossip, films reviews, recipes, weather and traffic reports...And who could forget that classic quiz game Bamboozle, with the Lego-like host Bamber Boozler, which took ages to load and was always crashing?!
But it doesn’t really have a place in the world of today’s consumer. Why, when you can get all these services in a few clicks online – as well as being able to chat, browse, buy, read reviews, discuss products etc in an instant – would you want to spend ages trawling through a clunky site with pages that took an age to refresh?
People didn’t. It had been loss-making for years but I was interested to read this quote from Mike Stewart, the group managing director of Teletext, on the T3 website: “Usage may be half its peak but we still have 11 to 12 million viewers a week, and most internet businesses say you could make plenty of money with that.” In fact, Teletext will now be switching its attention to its more lucrative travel websites.
And perhaps there’s the warning. As consumers consume more and more online at an accelerating rate, you don’t want to be left behind the times.
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