Have a look at Tiresias. It was designed for legibility on television.

thaanks justin

anymore?

I made fonts for MS WEB-TV in 1998.

Fonts should have 2 pixel wide features, stems, counters or serifs and spaces between letters. If they are one pixel they will be lost in most cases due to the line scans and blur.

Bigger size and bold is better.
Colours: No pure Black on pure White... causes visable movemnet and noise.

Use Anti-aliasing or anti-flicker filters to smooth out the colours so the gun doesn't cause noise or spikes. ie... going from full OFF to FULL on is bad that's why pure black and pure white are bad.

Our fonts were manually tuned and use Windows CE and Windows anti-aliasing, plus an additional filter for antiflicker.

this might be interesting:
http://www.typographer.org/

and this:
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/4100/11840.html

and this:
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/27691.html

Some would argue that Tiresias is the only way to go, as it was designed with these very limitations in mind.

Joe Clark, the undisputed expert in this particular field, would probably say that the current state of television-font affairs is in an atrocious way (check it all out at joeclark.org).

Of course some people will let Helvetica and Univers pass muster for these sorts of jobs--but Tiresias will probably be your best bet.

The homepage of typographer.org does change (you know, from time to time *cough*) so the article will eventually drop off.

A permanent link for the type on television article on typographer.org's front page is:

http://www.typographer.org/2004_03_01_digests.html

very useful indeed
thanks a lot everybody!