Money Channel to Launch Digital Text

Published Monday, Apr 23 2001, 07:51 BST | By Iain Chapman

The Money Channel will add a Digital Text Service from the end of April. This new service has been developed by Exeter based Digital Impact, who have been working with The Money Channel since June of last year, developing a fully interactive channel and website.

Between Digital Impact and The Money Channel, this new Digital Text service will deliver live financial news and dynamic stock exchange data.

The new service is implemented as a fully functional OpenTV application, which can take advantage of all of the capabilities of the Set Top Box. This gives an alternative to applications that make use of the WAP browser for menus and options, that are much more limited in terms of format and presentation. In addition the complex WAP browser application adds a large overhead to OpenTV applications that use it, requiring more bandwidth and / or offering slower response times. Digital Impact's application does not suffer from any of these drawbacks.

Users of the Digital Text service will have access to:

Context-driven links between stories and current share prices.

Graphs showing historical share performance detailing both share price movement as well as the latest price, which is updated every 15 minutes.

Individual shares searchable by the EPIC code.

Money Guides providing information on issues such as Income Tax and Mortgages.

As well as this background programme information will also be available, as well as information on The Money Channel presenters.

This Digital Text service will be the first third party digitext service launching from the text key.