Antiope ( teletext ) This article is about a teletext system , for other things and people named Antiope , see Antiope . Antiope was a French teletext standard in the 1980s . Work on it started in 1975 . The nice-sounding 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 . Antiope had a redefinable character set , which allowed more sophisticated displays than the BBC 's Ceefax . A decoder would typically take the form of an external set-top box , connected to the television set through its SCART connector . A fundamental difference in technical philosophy between Antiope and Ceefax stemmed from the fact that Antiope was developed by telecommunications engineers , while Ceefax was developed by television engineers . This resulted in Antiope being a packet-switching system , with variable length packets of data , as might be used on a telephone network . By contrast , the BBC 's television engineers had a fixed amount of space in each of the two lines used from the television picture 's vertical blanking interval . So each `` packet '' of data on Ceefax was a fixed size of 40 characters , based on the space available in one of the 625 lines of a PAL ( or SÉCAM ) television picture . Antiope has been replaced by the European teletext , which was based on Ceefax . The replacement occurred before 1991 on France 2 and France 3 and around 1992 on TF1 . Antiope vanished before teletext became popular in France . External links Beginnings Screen examples Categories : Teletext In other languages : Deutsch | Français 