Softel USA - Products for the Digital Age

Spider makes it easy to convert information contained in one or more Teletext services into a format suitable for use on an Internet web site.

Teletext provides a rich source of news, sports, financial, weather, TV listing and other information. TV broadcasters running both Teletext and Web sites will find it be much easier and faster to use this existing source of up to the minute information than re-authoring everything for the web site.

Spider is a Windows NT application that can run either on an existing Softel Teletext system, or as a standalone task that decodes Teletext off-air. Spider output is in the form of updated HTML data files.

Save time and effort by using existing Teletext content to update pre-prepared HTML template pages.
Spider detects any change to a Teletext page and generates updated HTML in real time.
Use standard web authoring software to define creative HTML background pages in your own styles.
Define Teletext source tags in the HTML to specify which paragraphs or tables of text are copied from the Teletext service.
Create HTML hyperlinks using Teletext news headline pages.
Spider can be used to generate all or part of a web site.

Spider becomes even more useful when used in conjunction with a Softel Cyclone or Vortex Teletext management system. These have powerful scheduling and batch language tools that ensure that pages such as TV listings are updated automatically at the right time. Vortex and Cyclone users may also create new ‘virtual’ web Teletext services which take copies of existing on-air pages but reformat them in a form suitable for use on the web.

The style in which the information is presented in HTML format is limited only by the imagination of the web designed. Standard web editing software is used to create background templates containing house style graphics and text headlines. The source is annotated to include text elements by defining their source page, row and column positions.

Spider NT is a Windows NT application for installation on a Softel Cyclone or Vortex Teletext system.
Spider PC is a rackmount PC supplied with off-air (or baseband) Teletext decoder card and Lan card.

Spider will output HTML to a nominated shared directory or may FTP to a web site. Web editing tools for creating the template source pages are not included.

Figure 1: Before....Teletext page in Flair Figure 2: After....Spider HTML page created from the teletext page shown in Figure 1.