Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Ceefax, the BBC’s teletext service that allowed viewers to access text-based information on their TV sets, and which blazed a trail for the on-screen services we use today.
With its name referring to how users could ‘see facts’, Ceefax was the first service of its kind in the world, and while its initial offering of news, sport and weather content consisted of a few dozen pages, these eventually grew to as many as 600 pages covering a wide range of content.
The content was generated by a team of editors who were tasked with monitoring UK and global news feeds, and turning it into short-form content suitable for the limited space available on a Ceefax page.
And while at the time of Ceefax’s launch very few UK homes had TV sets capable of showing its content, as higher-spec TVs became more widespread Ceefax’s audience grew. At one point it had 22 million weekly users.
Each Ceefax page had its own number, allowing users to navigate their way to individual pages using the keys on their TV remote control.
Among the most-used were the sports pages from 301 and above. Pre-internet, it was standard for football fans at home to sit and ‘watch’ the screen as it refreshed with score updates. Probably not the most exciting way to get your sports news, but it was relatively riveting at the time.
Overtaken by new technologies
In many ways Ceefax and other services such as Teletext, Oracle and FourText, which were available on commercial broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 4, were a precursor to the internet and also the on-screen services that are now commonplace, such as BBC’s iPlayer.
It gave people access to a previously untapped wealth of regularly updated news and information at the touch of a button (or maybe at the touch of a few buttons). In fact, writer Barney Ronay once described the service as ‘the horse-drawn internet’.
And it was the development of digital technologies that ultimately led to the analogue service’s dwindling use and, ultimately, its demise. As digital TV was rolled out across the UK, this meant the end of the Ceefax in 2012.
While Ceefax might trigger memories for some of us, there’s a generation to whom it’s pretty unfamiliar. We showed some of Ofcom’s colleagues – across a range of ages – some modern-day news in Ceefax’s format, to see how they’d get to grips with it. Take a look at how they got on: