BPN 1719: Flemish VTR Teletekst service ceases

The Flemish Radio and Television Organization (VRT), the Flemish/Dutch lingual part of the state sponsored BRT, will stop with the broadcasting of teletext in phases. The number of people using teletext, is decreasing in recent years, in Belgium. Only the subtitling of television programs via teletext will be continued.

VTR Teletekst service was launched on May 8, 1980 by the BRT. In 2005, 800,000 people watched the teletext pages of the VRT daily. In 2009 this figure had decreased to only 599.388 people per day in 2013 the figure was further halved to around 295.381 Flemings per day. In 2014 there were 123.709 unique visitors, according to the annual report of the VRT.

 The private Flemish news channel VTM launched its teletext on February 1, 1996. On October 31, 2014 the service was abolished. The functions were taken over by the website vtm.be and the VTM app. The subtitle function on page 888 remained available.

Turning point

After 35 years of teletext services are on a turning point. With the introduction of internet in the nineties teletext services were integrated in the websites of broadcasting companies. But now the teletext function has been taken over by apps. The BBC teletext service Ceefax is already defunct since 2012. Yet teletext services in France and Germany are still in operation. The popularity, however, of teletext is decreasing by the use of connected televisions, set-up boxes, but especially by consulting tablets and smartphones.

When will Dutch Teletekst stop?

In the Netherlands Teletekst service of the state sponsored broadcast company NOS is still pretty popular. The service was launched on April 1, 1980 with 700 consumers, who could receive teletext on their television. When commercial television was allowed in The Netherlands in 1989 teletext services were part and parcel of their broadcasts, but they never were competition for the NOS Teletekst service. With the introduction of internet the NOS Teletekst service was integrated on the Digital City web side and on the NOS broadcasting company in January 1994. In 2000 2,8 million people used the service daily, but from that point onwards the audience decreased to 2,5 million users of teletext on television. Another 2,5 million people consumed teletext on their computer, mobile or tablet. By 2014 the total figure was down to 3,5 million Teletekst users. Will the NOS Teletekst be still alive by 2020?

BPN 1410 Internet kills off Teletext UK

Today is the last day for Teletext UK. From now on the Brits will have check the arrival and departure times for planes on their computer or IPTV screens. Only special services like subtitling and the results of horse race betting will be available on analogue screens and can not be moved interactively. This will be the real end to teletext on UK television. Teletext had already been given up by the BBC and commercial broadcast companies and had been handed over to Teletext UK, a commercial company, making the service available through advertising.

In 1972, research engineers of the government owned BBC put together a number of new technological developments and found a way of making better use of the ordinary television signal.

They found that the British standard 625 line TV picture has several 'spare' lines, not used to form the screen image. Digital pulses, travelling as part of the regular TV signal, could with the aid of a decoder built into the domestic receiver, be formed into numbered panels of textual information called 'ages.' These pages look rather like pages of typescript, except that they can also include large-size letters and simple drawings; maps, graphs, diagrams, and so on, in any of six colours. Each page can carry as many as 200 words. A hand-held remote control unit could be used to select individual pages by tapping in the number of the page required. They called this system Ceefax.

The BBC was not alone in its discovery. The IBA, controllers of Britain's commercial radio and TV stations, were also developing a teletext system. They called their system Oracle: Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics.

Within six months the BBC had begun test transmissions of Ceefax. In 1974 all the organizations with an interest in the new information systems came together with the object of devising a unified standard. On 23 September of that year a trial experiment began for both systems culminating in the Autumn of 1976, with the government giving the green light to start full transmissions of both Ceefax and Oracle.



From 2001 onwards the service starts loosing the interest of the television companies’ management. Eventually Teletext UK takes over the services, but closes them as there is not enough advertisement revenues coming from the service.

So the country, where teletext started in 1972, will be without the service from today onwards. However on the continent, teletext is still going strong in countries like Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium and, of course , in France, where they have their own system Antiope.In the Netherlands for example the Teletekst service is still a popular service with the public broadcast, but also with the commercial broadcast stations. In fact Teletekst of the public broadcast system will celebrate its 30th launching day on April 1, 2010. The commercial stations, which only started in 1989, have used teletext. The use between the public service and the commercial service is different as commercial teletext contains pink services. So far nonen of the continental services is thinking about giving up the eldest consumer new medium.

Blog Posting Number: 1410

Tags: teletext, teletekst

BPN 1033 BBC protects Dutch TV distribution rights

BBC fights with a Dutch dish contractor about the distribution of television packages for BB1 and BBC. Both parties are now involved in a legal case. The case was reported by Peter Olsthoorn in Emerce.

The Dutch dish contractor Hertzinger has grown into the media distribution business besides the installation of satellite receptors and glass fibre connectors in housing complexes and housing projects. Hertzinger picks up the satellite signals centrally and distributes them by glass fibre cables to homes.

Hertzinger competes with cable operators. In Amsterdam the company modestly competes for example with UPC; Hertzinger has some 10.000 subscribers to its services there. The difference between the Hertzinger and the UPC offers is that UPC installs, owns and operate the cable, while the satellite reception and connectors for the cable are owned by the organisation of home owners and home companies. Hertzinger delivers media services, for example, to the glass fibre operator Ons Net in Nuenen and to several other glass fibre networks.


Hertzinger delivers media packages or as it claims on its site, rights to media packages. It sells its service for a few euro under the price of the cable operators and even less in case of housing corporations. The company delivers for example 50 television channels and 30 radio channels for 14 euro.

Hertzinger claims that it is allowed to deliver BBC1 and BBC2 in the media packages and has the right to do so. But BBC does not agree on this point as the BBC has only an agreement with NLkabel, the Dutch association of cable operators, for the distribution of the BBC1 and BBC2 channels against an agreed tariff.

The whole affair started last year with an injunction, but this was suspended and in May 2007 converted into a full fledged legal case between the state company BBC and Hertzinger. The legalities of the case look easy. BBC is owner of the content and distribution rights, so a company should have an agreement with the BBC. On the other hand BBC1 and BBC2 can be received by satellite for free. In the Netherlands BBC1 and BBC2 are included in the media packages and the cable operators pay for this distribution right and charge subscribers for these channels. Problem is that BBC has an exclusive agreement (= monopoly) with the members of the cable operators’ association. When Hertzinger looses the case, it will have to negotiate with BBC or drop the channel from its package. Besides when Hertzinger looses this case, other television and radio channels might hand in a claim for payment. A ruling is expected in the coming months.

Blog Posting Number: 1033

Tags: television, distribution rightstelevision,cable, cable distribution

BPN 1015 European research project to shape next generation internet TV

This is an important announcement from the European research front on the next generation internet TV. P2P-Next, a pan-European conglomerate of 21 industrial partners, media content providers and research institutions, has received a €14 million grant from the European Union. The grant will enable the conglomerate to carry out a research project aiming to identify the potential uses of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for Internet Television of the future. P2P-Next will develop an open source, efficient, trusted, personalized, user-centric and participatory television and media delivery mechanism with social and collaborative connotations using the emerging P2P paradigm, which takes into account the existing EU legal framework. The partners intend to develop a Europe-wide “next-generation” internet television distribution system, based on P2P and social interaction.

P2P provides an alternative to the traditional client/server architecture of computer networks and signifies the next big step in the evolution of internet media delivery. While employing the existing broadband networks, each participating computer, referred to as peer, functions as both a client and a server for a given application. A P2P network enables the sharing of content files or streams with audio, video and data content. Today it is considered increasingly as a potentially efficient and reliable mechanism for distributing any media to the general public worldwide.

The P2P-Next project will run over four years, and plans to conduct a large-scale technical trial of new media applications running on a wide range of consumer devices. If successful, this ambitious project could create a platform that would enable audiences to stream and interact with live content via a PC or set top box. In addition, it is our intention to allow audiences to build communities around their favourite content via a fully personalized system. This technology could potentially be built into Video on Demand (VOD) services in the future and plans are underway to test the system for major broadcasting events.

The project has an open approach towards sharing results. All core software technology will be available as open source, enabling new business models. P2P-Next will also address a number of outstanding challenges related to content delivery over the internet, including technical, legal, regulatory, security, business and commercial issues.

One of the project managers is the TU in Delft, which developed Tribler, a social based peer-to-peer system. The system can be downloaded for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu Linux and GNU Linux. With this system, the TU has been able to experiment and attract the attention of TV giants like the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

The complete list of Partners is:
AG Projects - Haarlem, Netherlands
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) - London, United Kingdom
DACC Systems - Taby, Sweden
Technische Universiteit Delft - TU Delft - Delft, Netherlands
Fabchannel - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Institut für Rundfunktechnik - IRT - Munich, Germany
Josef Stefan Institute - Ljubljana, Slovenia
Kendra Foundation - London, United Kingdom
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan - KTH - Stockholm, Sweden
Markenfilm - Wedel, Germany
Norut - Tromsø, Norway
First Oversi - Petach Tikva, Israel
Pioneer Digital Design Centre Limited - London, United Kingdom
RTV Slovenia - RTVSLO - Ljubljana, Slovenia
STMicroelectronics - Milan, Italia
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) - Geneva, Switzerland
University of Klagenfurt - Klagenfurt, Austria
University of Lancaster - Lancaster, United Kingdom
University of Rome - Rome, Italy
University Politehnica of Bucharest - Bucharest, Romania
VTT – Technical Research Centre of Finland, Tampere, Finland

Blog Posting Number: 1015

Tags: TV, p2p

BPN 1005 Dutch public broadcast videos available

The public broadcast companies NOS and a BNN offer now the opportunity to copy videos to the personal Hyves.nl pages. The NOS offers already feeds to sites and blogs. Copying NOS and BNN videos to a Hyves.nl profile, internet sites and blogs will be just as easy copying YouTube videos. The NOS now offers items from the news programs; the NOS has now applied micro-chunking to their news and broadcasts, so that specific items can be selected. Also BNN offers videos through the digital channel 101.tv.

Now users can add fragments to Hyves.nl pages concerned with specific programs from BNN or news or sports items to a Hyves.nl profile of a user. At the same time Hyves.nl users can start to broadcast with their mobile phone, as the site allows for example software from Livecastr.

The move of NOS was announced in November in an iMMovator cross-media café. It has some likeness with the move of the BBC, which offers also video fragments to users. But there are some differences with BBC and there are some unsolved questions.

The NOS offers actual news and sports items and items of the short term archive Program missed?. It does not offer any long term historical items. These video items are archived by the Institute of Image and Sound. In order to get a 3 minute item of 1980, the item can be retrieved by any internet user on a public database, but then a long way of negotiating starts. The item might still be on nitrate film and has then to be converted to a digital format. But before this is possible, permission is needed from the news staff. Once that is given and the conversion has been done, you will have to pay about 600 euro for the 3 minute item in order to show it on a site. It is not possible to make an embedded link to that particular video.

BBC has clearly limited the opportunity to use embedded video or a requested video to users in the UK. They have paid for the television license and can use it. I have not seen any country restrictions on the use of embedded video fragments. I will have to ask one of my tech savvy friends outside the Netherlands to try it out.

The public television allows now embedded video links. Of course the question rises again, whether money can be claimed by collecting societies for neighbouring rights or for art work rights. When a news item deals with a special concert like the Lohengrin concert opera a week ago, the collecting society for neighbouring rights can claim that embedded links are new publications. Or when someone gives an interview in front of a famous contemporary painting a collecting society for art work protection will send an invoice. I wonder when the first invoice will be on the doormat of a blogger, if only to start a test case.

At last NOS starts to experiment. It will be interesting to see how long it will take them to offer historical items.

Blog Posting Number: 1005

Tags: copyright, embedded link

BPN 1003 Collecting society questions embedded video links

This week Dutch bloggers got frightened. The Dutch music copyright collecting society Buma/Stemra had released an e-mail., stipulating that bloggers who incorporate music movies from video sites in their blog will have to get a license. However Buma/Stemra told the bloggers that the e-mail was released prematurely and that for the time being they did not have to fear any legal action.

A number of music blogs received an e-mail from the collecting society. It said that Buma/Stemra had noticed that the sites actively offered material from the world music repertory, which is guarded by the collecting society. In order to continue legally with offering the music the bloggers would have to pay an annual fee to Buma/Stemra. One of the blogs was Myownmusicindustry.nl (MOMI), which promptly ask Buma/Stemra for an explanation.

The collecting society answered promptly with an explanation and statement about the e-mail. The explanation, which also was published by MOMI, made clear that it concerned movies from for example YouTube which were integrated in the site of the blogger. This was seen as a new publication, which should be licensed. Just linking to the respective movie is not seen as a problem, as the source is responsible for the use of the music.

Buma/Stemra said that the e-mail had been sent pre-maturely. The organisation has started up a new department dealing with online music and they are still researching the phenomenon of integrated music videos. The collecting society said that it is happy with the present licensing models, but that it had to look ahead and see what was possible in the future and feasible. It said that it is having meetings with organisations having experience with offering copyrighted material.

The discussion on the weblog MOMI is rather fierce. The collecting society is portrayed as a police ticketing machine. Some web loggers give advice not to answer as Buma/Stemra has asked for the their name and license number. And only a few web loggers analyse the problem. Buma/Stemra sees the integrated movie as a new publication, while the web loggers see it as an embedded link. Embedded video has become popular with website as YouTube. This video site picks up almost half of its traffic from third party blogs and sites. The embedded video is online video in which the video screen of the sender through html code is integrated with the webpage of third parties. In the meantime broadcast companies like BBC offer their video material to integrate video and audio in third party websites.

Embedded video bears some likeness with the problem of frames, whereby pages from a site were framed by a third party site in their site. It was a hype for some time as it could be created by a simple link. So in most cases no permission was from the original site owner. Framing eventually was legally contested and has disappeared as feature.

Update 11/02/2008: The Swedish Performing Rights Society (STIM) has shown willingness to sign cooperation agreements with ISPs. STIM wants to sit down with the ISPs and discuss how it can work together to enable their customers to pay - via their internet subscription - for the music streaming through the providers' networks, thereby allowing them to become legal music surfers. According to STIM's model, an average user's monthly internet costs will rise in proportion to the total amount of music being downloaded. In return, internet users will be able to access and download all the music available on the internet at a given time. But STIM also concedes that a number of technical, financial and legal barriers need to be overcome before their proposal gains general acceptance.

Blog Posting Number: 1003

Tags: copyright, publication, collecting society, embedded link, framing

Public media: get it, copy it and share it

At the iMMovator Crossmedia Cafe Monique de Haas (see photograph) presented some ideas about a social networking on behalf of the Dutch public broadcast (NPO), a holding of the non-profit broadcast companies. The idea are presently fully crystallised yet, but they under development. The basic idea of the project is that content should be able to be retrieved, copied and shared. The Dutch public broadcast hopes to launch their project before coming December.

The public broadcast so far has been a closed system. The audience was not involved. But now it looks like the public broadcast is opening up and posing the question, what people want to do with the content provided by the public broadcast. People want to put this information in a new context. For the public broadcast this will mean that tit will have to open up so that people can fetch the content, copy it and share it through their blogs, for example.

A big problem is of course how the public broadcast will control this process. So far the public broadcast has been very tight about copying. So far they have not undertaken actions against illegal copying yet. But when I asked the national broadcast archive for the video report of the launch of the first commercial online service in the Netherlands, I was told that if I would get permission, it would cost me 600 euro; for that money I could show the 3 minutes video report on blog. But it all depended on the permission from the NPO Journaal department! (Mind you, I have paid for the public broadcast through special levies and taxes all the time that I lived in the Netherlands). Of course the Dutch public broadcast has an example in the BBC Creative Archive, where they are carefully experimenting with creative commons in copying for sites and blogs; of course this project concerns the broadcast’s archive and not the daily programs.

I liked the idea that the Slovenian broadcast company worked out so far. They have launched Strip mine, a site where they have cut up their videos in small parts (micro-chunking), present the programs with a photograph, with the text of the program and with a link to the video. In the text they automatically apply links to the Wikipedia. But best of all, the company sends a message to bloggers, that there is content which fits their personal preferences. In this way the bloggers get authentic content and can quote precisely to argue their case.

Blog Posting Number: 911

Tags: broadcast, micro-chunking, broadcast archive, creative commons

P2P not suited for distributing broadcast video

Recently UK ISPs complained to the BBC that it put the entire logistic and financial burden on the ISPs with regard to the distribution of video. BBC has introduced its own software iPlayer with a plug-in for the users. The BBC software uses partly peer-2-peer technology. BBC saves on hosting and data costs, but the ISPs get higher costs. Also in the Netherlands problems are showing up between broadcasters and ISPs; with the live streams of the French cycle event Tour de France many ISPs was forced to its limits. Tonie van Ringelenstein, a Dutch freelance journalist, writing amongst others for Emerce, made a tour around the experts and discovered that a new cooperation between providers and broadcasters is upcoming.

Some time ago there was already talk of using the new P2P software Tribler for distributing broadcast material. A trial of the Dutch public broadcast companies and two universities to relay the content of the popular broadcast site Missed the program, has not started yet due to legal complications.

Now a new initiative comes from providers active in the internet exchange Ams-IX. Providers, public broadcast companies and the commercial TV company RTL Netherlands are talking to each other in order to reach an open protocol, so that the video distribution through internet will become cheaper and more reliable. The first tests are planned for this autumn. In this system the most popular content items of the broadcast companies will be put on the servers of the providers automatically; the providers will be able to distribute them through their own network. It saves data traffic for the ISPs and will put less strain on the servers of the broadcasters.

Presently there is already some experience with the system as the public broadcast companies use it amongst themselves. A subgroup of the AMS-IX video working party consisting of public broadcast companies, RTL, XS4all and Solcon works on the protocol. It will be an open protocol for all video content providers, providing them with an automatic caching of the most interesting video content. In this way the content is brought as close to the user as possible. Popular videos are counted by the ISP and as soon as a maximum is reached the content file will be automatically cached for further distribution.

The situation in the Netherlands is favourable for the cooperation between the providers and the broadcast companies given the success of AMS-IX, the on-demand video sites of the Public broadcast companies and RTL and the high amount of broadband connections in the Netherlands. Besides there is much video content on hand in the Netherlands and the demand is great.

The activities take place within a trial. The business side of business models, financial clearance among the parties and legal complications will be ignored during the trial. Basis for the trial is to transport content to the end-user in a proper way, efficiently and cheaply.

Blog Posting Number: 851

Tags: video, peer-2-peer

My museum of content related artefacts (24)

1978: Teletekst

I have also saved two pictures of the television information and subtitling service Teletekst, which started an experimental phase on April 1, 1978. This service was based on the BBC service Ceefax (see fax). Two employees of the Dutch public broadcast service NOS, Jan Buddingh and Cees Veenendaal saw the Ceefax service in 1976 and started lobbying for introduction in the Netherlands.










On April 1, 1978 the Dutch broadcast foundation NOS started the experimental phase of Teletekst to experiment in a small church in Bussum outside broadcast city Hilversum. This period was closed with the launch of Teletekst. Project leader Wim Stokla managed a small department, which took care of the 100 pages, mainly news pages and pages with information on radio and television programs. But the department also took care of undertitling programs. On October 4,5, and 6, 1980 at the start of the new television season, the department took care of undertitling the trilogy Mourning becomes Elektra (Rouw past Elektra), a television play by John van de Rest.Teletekst was in some way a source of confusion for new media novices, so on September 5, 1978 a symposium was held under the title Viewdata and Teletekst. People had to be given an explanation that teletext was a broadcast medium transported by the ether and forwarded by cable, while for videotext information was transported over the telephone line. But by its launch Teletekst was clearly profiled as a broadcast service. The service was a broadcast medium by legal definition with moving pages. The broadcast industry did not any interference by commercial parties. With the advent of commercial broadcast companies in 1989 the teletext system became also in commercial use.

The introduction of Dutch language service Teletekst took some time as television sets needed a particular chipset. For the launch special decoder boxes were sold. However the new television sets after 1980 had a built-in chip set; such television set bore the price tag of 3000 Dutch guilders (roughly less than 1500 euro). These days it is difficult to get a television set without a teletext chip set in the Netherlands.The first Teletekst computer could store 100 pages. At the end of 1981 the computer could hold 200 pages. The Teletekst editorial staff was extended and the NOS Teletekst service had become part and parcel of the broadcasting service, according to Wim Stokla. Eventually the amount of pages grew to 1000 pages. This created space for more information categories. So next to the news and broadcast information pages new services were linked into the services. One of the most popular services before the Internet era was the Schiphol service on departure and arrival times. When in 1989 the commercial broadcasting companies atrted to broadcast, they also started to use the teletext facilities for commercial use such as (sex) advertisement. In 1995 more than 80 per cent of the Dutch households had a television with Teletekst facility.

With the arrival of Internet, Teletekst got the PC as an extra outlet. In 1993 the NOS started its own Teletekst site on internet. In 2000 the service got its own browser, which can be downloaded. In the meantime Internet and mobile phones have become extra outlets for Teletekst. This has an effect on the visits to the Teletekst pages on television, which are going down. By 2004 the viewing figure had gone down to 2,2, million people, a drop of 20 per cent since 2000.

Has Teletekst a future or will it be replaced by interactive teletext? Looking at the growth of setup boxes for digital television in Great Britain, the bell for teletext will toll in the near future. An interactive teletext service on a setup box looks more like an Internet news service and will offer more and better graphical information than the present teletext system. In the Netherlands the change over will take some time and will depend on the change over from analogue broadcast to digital broadcast.

On Tuesday April 1, 2005 the Dutch television information and subtitling service Teletekst existed 25 years. It has been the longest running and most used new media service ever.

Next - Previous

Blog Posting Number: 833

Tags: digital heritage