Out With A Whimper - Videotext To End

So the announcement was made previously that the Teletext service would end in 2012 along with the completion of UKs switch to Digital TV. However service provider Teletext has accelerated the end of the analogue service in the UK to January 2010.

While the announcement affects really only the public Teletext service - it means that support for the closed Videotext service really cannot occur past this date.

So the once almighty and omnipresent Viewdata (aka Videotext, Prestel, CEPT 3 etc etc) has finally been killed by the web. It will likely also hasten the end of many of the smaller UK agents who relied on the service.

for those of us who tried very hard to kill it and then even more to actually get it to work on top of GDS systems - this will come as a moment of nostalgia. Send me your reflections and at some point I will compile a collection of them.

So onto the web. I wonder if we will ever have a time when we watch the end of closed user functionality based systems - such as a GDS for example?

Now that's an interesting thought.

Cheers