ORACLE (teletext) ORACLE (teletext) ORACLE (from "Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics") was a commercial teletext service first broadcast on the ITV network in the mid-late 1970s and later on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, finally ending on both channels at 23:59 UTC on 31 December 1992. It was developed and launched by a consortium backed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority at about the same time as the BBC's Ceefax service. Due to the lack of available receivers, exact launch dates have been left obscure. Receivers became popular around 1980. In Britain ORACLE, ITV's teletext service, was launched as
Teletext to the TV station. These services have since been superseded by the World Wide Web. With the advent of digital television some countries adopted the name "digital teletext" for newer standards, despite the older teletext standards' digital nature. "Digital teletext" is encoded with standards including MHEG-5 and Multimedia Home Platform (MHP). Other countries use the same teletext streams as before on DVB transmissions, due to the DVB-TXT and DVB-VBI sub-standards. Those allow the emulation of analog teletext on digital TV platforms, directly on the TV or set-top box, or by recreating analog output, reproducing the vertical blanking interval data in