Antiope (teletext)

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This article is about a teletext system, for other things and people named Antiope, see Antiope.

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Antiope was a French teletext standard in the 1980s. Work on it started in 1975.

The nice-sounding term allegedly stood for Acquisition Numérique et Télévisualisation d’Images Organisées en Pages d’Écriture, which could be loosely translated as Digital Acquisition and Remote Visualization of Images Organized into Written Pages.

Antiope had a redefinable character set, which allowed more sophisticated displays than the BBC’s Ceefax. A decoder would typically take the form of an external set-top box, connected to the television set through its SCART connector.

A fundamental difference in technical philosophy between Antiope and Ceefax stemmed from the fact that Antiope was developed by telecommunications engineers, while Ceefax was developed by television engineers. This resulted in Antiope being a packet-switching system, with variable length packets of data, as might be used on a telephone network. By contrast, the BBC’s television engineers had a fixed amount of space in each of the two lines used from the television picture’s vertical blanking interval.

So each “packet” of data on Ceefax was a fixed size of 40 characters, based on the space available in one of the 625 lines of a PAL (or SÉCAM) television picture.

Antiope has been replaced by the European teletext, which was based on Ceefax. The replacement occurred before 1991 on France 2 and France 3 and around 1992 on TF1. Antiope vanished before teletext became popular in France.