The legacy BBC red button text service was unavailable for several hours on Saturday on Freeview.
A number of users took to social media to complain, and RXTV was alerted to the outage when we spotted a spike of website traffic, including 2,218 search requests on the subject of Red Button Text between 10:00 and 14:00 on Saturday.
The BBC hasn’t commented on the downtime of the text service, which was threatened with closure in 2019, but won a reprieve after protests from users and campaign groups.
Red Button Text contains a limited range of international, national and regional news headlines, business, sport and weather information, obtained from systems that also publish articles and data to the BBC website.
Twitter reaction to Saturday’s downtime.
Red Button Text returned on air at around 14:00 while we were testing the service’s availability on the BBC’s standard definition Freeview channels.
No longer widely available
That Saturday’s downtime wasn’t more widely noticed can be explained by the fact that the BBC text service, once touted as a replacement for Ceefax, isn’t as widely available on newer TVs and set top boxes.
The latest Freeview Play devices are no longer required to support MHEG-5, the technology behind the digital text service. Others that do support MHEG-5 will only display the text service if disconnected from the internet or where privacy settings are changed.
Instead, pressing red will send viewers to the newer HbbTV-based data service, formerly known as Red Button+, which now solely acts as a bridge to the BBC iPlayer.
Newer Freesat, Sky and Virgin Media boxes also default to the HbbTV-based service, which means viewers upgrading their equipment may find they lose access to the old text-based service.
Those that do still have access to the service and actually still use it are more likely to be older and/or don’t use social media, also limiting fallout.
The BBC text service on digital TV was originally used by over 12 million in 2011, just as digital switchover was nearing completion. But its growth was stunted as more and more users switched to smartphone apps and social media feeds to access the latest news, weather and sports results.
Marc Thornham