Antiope

Antiope was a French teletext standard in the 1980s. It also formed the basis for the display standard used in the French videotex service Minitel. The 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. History Work on Antiope started in 1972 at CCETT, the newly merged French national research centre for television and telecommunications in Rennes, with first field trials in 1975. The system was officially launched in 1976 at Vidcom in Cannes, and simultaneously at the СПОРТ 76 exposition in Moscow. It was adopted into the international standard CCIR 653 (now ITU-R BT.653) of 1986 as CCIR Teletext System A. Commercial broadcasting of Antiope began on Antenne 2 in 1979. To publicise the service, pages were even transmitted en clair instead of the test card (compare the BBC's Pages from Ceefax). TF1 and FR3 both also began to broadcast Antiope content from the early 1980s. Antiope decoding was initially by set-top boxes connected to the television by a SCART cable. Grundig France began to sell TVs with integrated decoders from 1983, followed by other manufacturers.