From: nigelm@ohm.york.ac.uk (Nigel Metheringham)
Newsgroups: uk.misc
Subject: Re: Teletext services (was Video Plus)
Date: 6 Jan 93 09:11:32 GMT
Organization: Electronics Department, University of York, UK

[Time for a change of subject to throw people off the trail :-) ]

In <1993Jan5.195232.16666@unipalm.co.uk> keith@unipalm.co.uk (Keith Mitchell) writes:

>>I liked the layout on Ceefax at first, probably because it was a change more
>>than anything... and I've been staring at the layouts for "Teletext on 3/4"
>>for so long, but after using it for a while I tend to agree with you, it's
>>a mess, the side bars are a waste of a good three characters.

Definitely - its bad enough only having 40 characters to work in
to start with (actually 39 since everyone sticks an alpha-colour
control as the first character of the line), but having a
graphics-colour, graphic, alpha-colour sequence at the start of the
line and graphics-colour, graphic at the end of the line cuts you
down to 35 characters - its just not enough!

>I think the new Ceefax layout is dreadful - they have removed the
>single page I used the most (Newswatch 102).

I actually quite like the set of news pages - there is an awful lot
of info in there now, but the Fastext links are lousy - poorly
thought out and fairly often just plain wrong (links often aren't
updated when either the page itself, or the next page is changed -
so you can have links pointing to non-existant pages).

The Summary page (now on 102) is useless, and I wish they would just
have links from 101 to at least one of the main news indexes (home -
110, politics - 130, world - 160).  The big gain is the newsround
pages, but then I'm a kid at heart!

Didn't the BBC say that they were aiming at an average access time
of 2.5 seconds on BBC1 - its closer to 20 seconds average (about 1
min peak).

>The new ITV/CH4 is much better - the presence of regional news is
>particularly to be commended. 
Agreed.  Although in the Yorkshire region we average (so far on 5
days service!) about 1 regional page every 36 hours.  I know things
happen round here, are they really not newsworthy or is it just that
they like the news story so much they are reluctant to change it. 
(Certainly the lead regional story on text is nowhere near the top
of the running order on the TV regional news!).

Is the service so incredibly slow everywhere??  A cycle through a
magazine takes close on a minute, and not all pages are transmitted
in each cycle so it can take 2 minutes or so to get a page - this
really is too slow to be useful.

Also, what do the rest of you have on magazine 6 on ITV?  Up until
yesterday (haven't checked more recently) we still had the set of
pages that used to live in magazine 2 (ie 2xx) being broadcast as
pages 6xx, and with the Christmas day TV news still in place (page
251 as was).  For a few hours on Sunday it changed so all pages read
something like "This is the regional ITV teletext pages", but then
the set of pages returned!

One final good comment.  The Bamboozle quizes, although a touch
trivial, are great fun - a good use of Fastext and the fact that the
pages are actually numbered in hex, so lots of pages can be accessed
by Fastext and not by your keypad.

	Nigel.

-- 
#   Nigel Metheringham  -- (NeXT) EMail: nigelm@ohm.york.ac.uk    #
#   System Administrator, Electronics Dept, University of York    #
#   York YO1 5DD. Phone: +44 904 432374, Fax: +44 904 432335      #
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