BBCi Zooms Along

Published on 28 July 2004 in , , , , , , ,

Today the new and improved BBCi launched on DTT (digital terrestrial television – the platform also known as Freeview).

The DTT service was the very first service, what was then BBC Text,

launched back in 1999 – 18 months before the first service on satellite.

Five years on the air left the service with a lot of old code, and ways of

working that were no longer appropiate. The team essentially rebuilt the

service from scratch which means that the service now is even faster than

it was before (and it was pretty bloomin’ fast already) – if there is a

faster interactive text service on digital TV in the UK, I haven’t used it.

With the re-working, a nice new design too. The whole thing looks and feels absolutely fantastic. Even someone using an ancient and slow OnDigital box will notice a big improvement (we have plenty of them in the office so we did). On a

decent box it easily gives Ceefax a run for its money, and will even more so when we get page numbers up and running.

Who says digital text services are slow?