Teletext on NTL cable

[Pinotage]

Is there any reason why BBC & ITV teletext does not work on NTL cable TV while CNN teletext does?

[LeMarchand]

I find that teletext works on varying channels at varying times. When I complained to NTL, they gave the semi-believable story that they resell Sky's package, but that Sky strip out the interactive content (surely a case for the monopolies commision?). I strongly suspect that the real reason is that NTL's software can't cope with the interactive portion of the signal.

[ManiacPony]

I presume you're talking about digital NTL... The BBC has spend large sums of money on its BBCi service, so removed ceefax from digital services to force you to use BBCi. It is not down to NTL. The "analogue interactive" part of a tv channel, ie the teletext is encoded in the first 12 and a half lines of the picture, they simply rebroadcast what they are sent, and have no way of removing it. You will often find (certainly with Auntie on Sky) that subtitles encoded on page 888 will work, but that the rest of the content is not available. On freeview digital subtitles are much more easily accessible that other mediums, and so no ceefax signal is broadcast at all. You can blame the broadcasters for not giving you teletext. Incidentally, for the digital interactive services Sky use a system called Open, Freeview uses MHEG (MPEG is the picture encoding) and cable uses an enhanced version of HTML as used for webpages.

[David H]

I can see how that applies to BBC, but 90% of the other channels don't have their text, only Sci Fi and Nick etc, from memory. This is a dual problem, as this is specific to non-interactive digital cables, who are worse off than analogue days as at least we had free games etc. Though I have never seen it, I doubt NTL's 3 or 4 interactive customers in the New Forest plus the one on an oil rig have any gaps in their text supplies, it is NTL's short-sighted policy of not upgrading to interactive as we don't have to pay extra for it, so (I was told this by my NTL operator) why bother to supply it at all? They will get nothing from it, so haven't spent the money. Simple. And as for monopolies, who can choose their cable supplier?