Editing ORACLE (teletext) (section)

==History==
It was developed and launched by the [[Independent Broadcasting Authority]]'s engineering division, about 4 years after [[British Broadcasting Corporation|BBC]]'s [[Ceefax]] service. Due to the lack of available receivers, exact launch dates have been left obscure. Receivers became popular around the early 1980s.

ITV Oracle made the world's first [[telesoftware]] broadcast in February 1977{{cn|date=January 2025}} and this led to a working demonstration of [[telesoftware]] at the 1978 International Broadcasting Convention{{cn|date=January 2025}}.

In Britain, ORACLE, ITV's teletext service, was launched as a new advertising medium on 1 September 1981 with 180,000 teletext sets in the country. By the following year, there were then 450,000 sets in the UK and that number was projected to rise to nearly three million at the end of 1985 and confident predictions of advertising revenues as high as $90{{spaces}}million (£50{{spaces}}million).<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Metzgen|first1=H|title=Key to the Information Revolution|journal=Videoitex '82|date=1982|page=38}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Metzgen|first1=H|title=New Teletext|journal=Videoitex User '86|date=1986|page=229}}</ref>

ORACLE moved away from being an experimental engineering department and more towards being a content provider. Under the original plans for the ITV franchise renewal, they were to have been scrapped at the end of 1992 and the few [[Vertical blanking interval|scan lines]] they used given to the highest bidder. ORACLE successfully campaigned for the creation of a franchise for the teletext service on ITV and Channel 4, only to find themselves outbid by [[Teletext Ltd.]], a consortium originally comprising [[DMG Media|Associated Newspapers]], [[Philips|Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.]] and Media Ventures International, who started broadcasting at midnight on New Year's Day 1993.