[4] During the late 1960s, engineers Geoff Larkby and Barry Pyatt at the Designs Department (Television Group) of the BBC worked on an experimental analogue text transmission system.

Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, then Director General of the BBC, was interested in making farming and stock-market prices available as hard copy via the dormant TV transmitters.

Before the Internet and the World Wide Web became popular, Ceefax pages were often the first location to report a breaking story or headline.

[6] In an interview with The Straits Times, he said that viewers got instant results for the recent snooker championships through its computers, rather than Oracle which had its reporter reading the scores through the telephone.

A similar idea was the French C Plus Direct satellite channel which used different, higher speed technology to broadcast PC software.

[citation needed] Until 2012, the BBC's Ceefax service was still providing information on topics covering News, Sport, Weather, TV Listings and Businesses.

[1][2] The BBC Red Button service was seen as an alternative to Ceefax and since 2007 the number of regions with a Ceefax-supported analogue signal had declined as digital switchover progressed across the UK.

At 23:32:19 BST on 23 October 2012, Ceefax was switched off after 38 years of providing news, weather and sport information when the Olympic Games champion Dame Mary Peters turned off the last analogue TV signal in Northern Ireland.

[11] In a tongue-in-cheek article on the 2017 general election, The Guardian gave political satirist Lord Buckethead a "Best Policy" award for the latter's manifesto pledge to bring back Ceefax.

Its replacement, BBC Red Button, is available on most digital services including Freeview, Virgin Media, Sky and Freesat.

As well as being able to display plain text, BBC Red Button offers richer graphics than Ceefax and a number of interactive video streams.

[citation needed] In September 2019, the BBC announced that the Red Button service would be discontinued in 2020, which would've ended 45 years of text content delivery via TV broadcast in Britain.

[13] However, on 29 January 2020, one day before the scheduled date of shutdown, the BBC suspended its decision, pending a review into it, after there were protests concerning certain demographics of people – for example, the elderly – with regards to what impact the removal of the service would have on them.

As with other teletext systems, text and simple graphics are transmitted in-band with the picture signal, and decoded by controller circuitry.

Initially, the in-vision broadcasts featured a variety of different topics – news, sport, weather and BBC TV listings.

[17] From the late 1980s onwards, Pages from Ceefax was increasingly marginalised by the BBC's move towards a near-continuous service, although BBC2 only gradually expanded its broadcasting hours when schools programming was not being shown.

To view Teefax, enthusiasts connect a Raspberry Pi running appropriate software to the signal input of a Teletext-capable TV.