RIP Ceefax. The BBC’s pixel-tastic teletext information service has officially been killed by the analogue switch-off.

The shutting down of its transmitters in the south of England in the early hours of Wednesday morning has sparked a wave of nostalgia among social media users for popular pages such as 302, home to the football results, or Planet Sound, the concisely subbed music magazine pages found on ITV/Channel 4’s defunct Teletext.

Ceefax’s nocturnal demise seems appropriate given one of the main functions of the service when it was first launched in 1974 was to fill television screens after “closedown”. It soon evolved as a home for everything from weather updates and flight arrival information to breaking news in the pre-internet age.

But Ceefax isn’t really dead, it has just been regenerated in digital TV homes as the BBC Red Button, which incorporates text alongside limited on-demand programming.

Likewise, RTÉ’s Aertel service will live on beyond the switch-off of analogue TV in October as Aertel Digital. It’s already available on Saorview and will make its way to UPC homes later this year, an RTÉ spokeswoman says, while the old version will be on the Sky platform.

It would be easy to underestimate the popularity of the original Aertel but as late as 2010, it had 749,000 daily analogue users, increasing to 753,000 in 2011 - this still far outweighs the figures for those who access the service online or via mobile.

“People like Aertel, they love knowing the numbers of the pages, so we decided to transition it onto digital,” the spokeswoman says.

Through international news aggregators such as Breaking News, which are busy launching news tickers for Samsung smart TVs, the “see facts” principle behind services such as Ceefax, Teletext and Aertel lives on.

But their pixellated colour block graphics, those remote control

panels of red-green-yellow-blue buttons and their excruciatingly slow-turning pages have all either been consigned to TV heaven, or are heading that way.