BBC Red Button BBC Red Button BBC Red Button is a branding used for digital interactive television services provided by the BBC, and broadcast in the United Kingdom. The services replaced Ceefax, the BBC's analogue teletext service. The service was launched in September 1999 as BBC Text. It was relaunched in November 2001 under the BBCi brand and operated under this name until late 2008, when it was rebranded as BBC Red Button. The "red button" name refers to the common interface on remote controls for digital televisions and set-top boxes, a red push-button which launches digital teletext services. Although initially marketed as
Teletext in the USA. A few other services were offered by some large-market TV stations in the US throughout the 1980s, such as Metrotext from KTTV in Los Angeles and KeyFax from WFLD in Chicago. Despite this, the system never caught on in the USA partly due to EIA-608 being deployed for captioning before Teletext was introduced and the higher cost of Teletext receivers. In the 1980s a similar system called Telidon was developed in Canada by the Department of Communications. It used a simple graphics language that would allow a more complex circuit in the TV to decode not only