Decoders will put pages on TV screens

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 19

Decoders will put pages on TV screens

PA Auckland Horoscopes, weather reports, recipes and news headlines should be regularly screened on New Zealand television from October, but few viewers are likely to see them.

The information will be contained in Television New Zealand’s “visual newspaper,” or teletext system. Only those with special decoders will receive the extra service.

However, the ready availability of the decoders, or television sets with built-in decoders is in some doubt.

Teletext enables “pages” of information to be transmitted as well as usual television broadcasts, on both channels.

Decoders will pick out the “pages” from the broadcast and put them on the screen instead of the programmes.

A control unit will allow viewers to flick through the “pages.” The system will start with a capacity of 200 “pages.” Television New Zealand will -use 100 of these to present information from recipes to news headlines.

The other, half will be operated by Rehabilitation International New Zealand, which has contributed $420,000 to the project and will provide an information service for the disabled.

But a sales manager of an Auckland rental television firm said that the introduction of the system seemed to have caught manufacturers “on the hop.” The manager of the components division of Philips Electrical, Mr Keith Mandeno, said he knew of no

New Zealand companies which could at present manufacture any great volume of teletext sets. The managing director of Thorn EMI Consumer Electronics, Mr Colin Martin, said that sets would be manufactured subject to demand. His company had built teletext receivers for Australia in 1978, but was not geared up to produce sets at the moment. Thorn has manufactured most of such receivers in the United Kingdon, where about a million sets have been sold.

Mr Martin did not see any problems in obtaining receivers from overseas if they were needed.

Both the manufacturers and the rehabilitation organisation favour sets with built-in receivers rather than decoders which could plug into existing television sets.

In America a decoder costs about $3OO. Mr Martin estimated the cost of a teletext receiver was 25 per cent more than a conventional set.

Others in the television industry make estimates of up to 70 per cent more. Mr Martin said experience in other countries had shown that plug-in decoders did not produce as satisfactory a result as a built-in set.

He said a plug-in decoder could cost up to 80 per cent of the difference between the conventional and a teletext set. Rehabilitation International’s involvement in the teletext project is funded from an $BOO,OOO grant from the 1981 telethon of the National Year of the Disabled.

The national secretary of Rehabilitation International, Mr K. J. F. Munro, said the service for the disabled would consist of facts about disabilities, news items from welfate groups and services for the disabled. Rehabilitation International has imported 2000 sets with built-in decoders which will arrive next month. These will be rented to disabled viewers to provide feedback on the suitability of the “pages.”

Mr Munro said he did not know the cost of the imported sets. TVNZ expects teletext to have the most immediate impact on the estimated 200,000 New Zealanders with impaired hearing. Programmes will be transmitted with “closed captioning,” wmcn uses teletext to send out captioned phrases to coincide with the dialogue.

The chairman of the TVNZ working party on teletext. Mr lan Richards,, said he had no idea how many programmes would be “close-captioned.” One thing preventing wholesale captioning is that it takes up to 15 hours to caption one hour of television, but increasing numbers of overseas programmes are already captioned.

Television New Zealand’s teletext system is compatible with systems in the United Kingdom and Australia.

In America about 30 hours of television a week are close-captioned.

Viewdata, the other system for putting information on a television screen, differs from teletext in that the information is carried on the telephone lines rather than broadcast and subscribers can choose and dial up specific information.