Antiope (teletext)

[1][2] Work on Antiope started in 1972 at CCETT, the newly merged French national research centre for television and telecommunications in Rennes, with first field trials in 1975.

[5][6] In 1980, CBS had lobbied U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) directly to make Antiope the teletext standard for the United States.

Across Europe 9 million sets had been sold equipped to receive teletext based on the UK standard; whereas in France, the only country using Antiope, sales had only reached 100,000.

Manufacture of Antiope-equipped TV sets ceased in 1987, and in 1989 broadcasts began in the rival European standard World System Teletext.

Although the transport protocols were different, much of the on-screen functionality of Antiope was recreated in the extended so-called Hi-Text Level 2.5 version of the European standard, first broadcast in 1994 by the bilingual French-German channel ARTE.

In both cases, the teletext data was transmitted during the vertical blanking interval, the portion of time allocated for the electron beam to return from the bottom of the screen back up to the top between each frame of the image (which corresponds to a transmission time of 25 lines in each field of PAL or SECAM), and each line used conveyed a fixed number of bytes each cycle: 40 bytes for European systems, 32 in the United States.