Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Not seeing red

It's not clear to me how ending the text services on BBC Red Button (announced for early next year) saves the organisation money.

This service of news and information started as BBC Text in 1999; morphed into BBCi in 2001, and drifted into BBC Red Button from 2008. In its early years, it ran in parallel with CEEFAX, which hit the digital buffers in 2012. The advantage of the text service was checking news and sport with simple navigation with the current tv show still in-vision - CEEFAX had a peculiar transparent setting, and more complex indexes.

As I understand it, Red Button text is scooped automatically from pages created for the BBC News website - so there's no saving in ongoing journalism costs. Is this switch-off really worth the hassle ?

1 comment:

  1. It's my understanding that it's the cost of the technical bit (supporting on receivers, TVs, STBS, etc) that is the expensive bit.

    A constantly moving target with almost limitless new versions and limited vendor support on the CE side.

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