Closed captioning suddenly "not available"

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Does anyone know why this would suddenly happen?

It's worked on my TV since I bought it back in 2009 (Samsung flatscreen LCD), but, starting last week, it suddenly gives the message "Not available" when I hit the "CC" button.

I called my cable company and they didn't know why, either--they claimed that there had been no changes to the signal recently (I looked this up and saw that certain types of HD signals don't support closed captioning from the TV decoder, but that would have happened a long time ago if it was going to). They did explain how to access it through the cable box. Still, I am curious--any ideas as to what might be going on?

Maybe your TV is broken in that area. My dvd player insisted there was "no disc" when it began failing to work.

as electronics start to break down features disappear before total failure often. It is a five year old TV, very little lasts that long in this modern age - possibly get a new one?

True. Products I bought many years ago lasted for many years. Those bought recently tend to fail much more quickly. We bought a good large screen LCD TV three years ago and now the remote control rarely works. Changed the batteries but the problem persists. However, I think the problem is with the receiver on the TV. The remote LED lights up when buttons are pushed but the TV LED rarely lights up to acknowledge it is getting a signal from it. So now it is necessary to get out of the chair and push the channel change and volume buttons on the back of the TV. Good exercise I suppose. The TV itself is still great, good picture etc.

Should not be the case, but is it possible it's looking for a CC protocol that no longer exists?

I doubt the feature would stop working just because of age. Did you try all channels with known CC programming? I find the CC feature works better with some channels/shows than others.

That's the other strange part: when I display the channel and show information (through the converter box), the "CC" symbol no longer appears, for ANY shows. However, I could get the CC to work via the converter box method described above.

Odd....

Why would a "CC protocol" stop existing?

Maybe for the same reason a 56KBps modem should work like it did 8 years ago but get lousy connections on one OS but better on a newer OS or even a newer 56KBps modem getting better connections than an 8-year-old modem.

The tech hasn't improved since dial-up is old school, but somehow the older modems/older OS combo results in poorer connections as time passes by.

I had that very problem a few years ago. I've only recently got wireless broadband out here in the sticks and was reliant on 56K USB dial up modem. However, after around twenty minutes connected, the connection gradually got slower and slower down to around 10k or even less. I finally realised it was the modem going faulty. If I disconnected and left it unconnected to the computer for an hour then plugged it back in again it worked at 56K again then got slower and slower again. The modem seemed to get relatively hot too, so I figure something must have gone faulty enough with the modem not to cause a total failure but something was making it get too hot which in turn reduced its performance / increased its error rate. Took a couple of months to figure the connection problem out. A replacement 56k USB modem solved the problem.