Fiktiv UK - Teletext

Teletext Ltd is the provider of teletext and digital interactive services for ITV, Channel 4 and Five in the United Kingdom.

Teletext Ltd started providing teletext services for ITV and Channel 4 on 1 January 1993, replacing the previous ORACLE service which had lost the franchise.

The company is now owned by Daily Mail and General Trust. Its main source of income is from revenue companies, mainly in the UK travel sector, who pay in order to advertise on its services on ITV, Channel 4, Five as well as on its website teletext.co.uk. The Chairman of Teletext Ltd is Chris Letcher.

On 16 July 2009, DMGT announced that the service would cease broadcasting most of its services on analogue television in January 2010, with the switch off date subsequently brought forward to 15 December 2009.

Teletext is a free service, financed by advertising. It is the largest holiday advertising medium in the UK and the most successful commercial teletext service in the world.

It is the combined product of information providers, advertisers, and our own in-house team of journalists and writers. Pages are sent from our headquarters in west London to transmitter sites across the UK.

This enables both national and regional services. In each transmitter area viewers can call up around 6,000 pages. On a typical day there are around 100,000 updates. Many of these updates are automatically copied to our website, ensuring viewers and internet users receive the same dynamic services at the precisely the same time.

Teletext exploits the development of digital television to improve the appearance of our service. In addition, it is easier to use since viewers have more control over pages and accessing key information is faster.

Teletext has a more modern font, uses the full range of colours and allows us to add photographs to the service. This service is fully interactive, linking you via a modem in your TV set or set-top box to deeper content held within our website, all accessible on demand using a remote control.

Teletext Limited launched the world's first commercial digital teletext service and plays a leading role in the development of digital teletext here in the UK and in Europe. Our engineers helped pioneer the European broadcasting standards for this platform.

Teletext is available on Freeview's digital terrestrial TV service through an aerial at no extra charge, on the interactive TV channel of the major cable TV company, Virgin Media and on Sky's satellite TV broadcasts, also under the interactive menu.

Our website provides up-to-the-minute reports on news, weather, sport, racing and finance, as well as Teletext Holidays, entertainment stories and local listings, and the local business directory service.