The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has recently updated the list of coupon eligible DTV converters that are NO LONGER available. If you would like to see a list of the currently available NTIA-approved CECBs (Coupon Eligible Converter Boxes) see this previous article.
Here is the list of NTIA-Approved digital-to-analog converters that are NO LONGER available according to manufacturers and retailers.
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Anyone who lives in rual areas will have problems. We can not get all the analog channels in digital and the ones we can get are not viewable every night. And when hurican IKE hit they all went off because they do not work in the rain. Worse yet the digital to analog box works better than the HDTV box because it does not need the higher bitrate. The result is that HDTV is unusable due to dropouts so I have to use a digital to analog box on my HDTV set.
From what I can see a lot of local TV channels will go under because the viewing areas are going to be cut in half.
Those are great points about the box. Most retailers overpriced them because they knew people would pay the extra $20. I doubt they cost more than $5 to make!
But, Death, consider this. The digital transmissions are free. That’s what makes them so great. I haven’t had transmission problems like you – some digital dropouts here and there but nothing to complain about.
The JOKER isn’t just in the new Batman movie—this fiasco of DTV continues to get darker (just like the Batman movie!). DTV does NOT work when the weather threatens—I lose most of my no-longer-so-local stations (Akron OH with Cleveland stations) to bad weather, this with an AMPlified outdoor rotatable antenna system. Here’s a box, there’s no longer a box, what a hoax. Just to be further aggravating, there really are no coupon paid boxes—everything costs more than 40 bucks, and wait until the total rings up—-yepper, ya gonna pay the state sales tax, local sales tax rider, support your public transit sales tax rider and all similar sales taxes on the coupon value, too!!! So the winners in this mess are the taxing authorities and the Chinese manufacturers of these all too unreliable boxes. And then they quit making them OR (as Partsman_ba says above, they told you they would but that was just to tease you because its also possible they never wil….. Just wait till this digital mess becomes permanent—it is a death knell for over the air television. and so I sign off—Digital Death……
The list which you copied is for boxes that are “NTIA-Approved & Not Currently Available,” NOT boxes that are no longer available. Most of the boxes on the list have not been released yet, or perhaps never will be released – only a few are ones that were being sold and are now no longer available.