Nielsen Says Nearly 9.6 Million Homes Can't Get Digital Broadcasts

As many as one in five U.S. households wouldn’t be able to watch TV if the analog-broadcasting cut-off scheduled for February were to happen today, according to estimates from The Nielsen Company. Nielsen said 9.6 million households aren’t yet equipped to receive digital broadcasts. And another 12.6 million, the company said, have at least one TV set that will be unable to receive programming when the transition takes place, unless they’re upgraded in the next four months.
Industry efforts to educate consumers about the changeover are working, Nielsen said – but maybe not fast enough. Over the four-month period ending September 1, another 1.4 percent of U.S. TV households got ready for the digital transition, leaving only 8.4 percent completely unprepared. At that rate, we’re looking at a little more than one in every 20 TV households losing their signal in February.

Demographically, Nielsen said the digital transition so far has taken hold most strongly among older, white households, with younger, African-America, Asian and Hispanic homes generally less prepared. Less educated, lower-income households are also less likely to be equipped to receive digital signals. Spanish-speaking households, in particular, haven’t gotten the message – about one-fourth of them are completely unready for digital broadcasting, Nielsen said.

Spanish-language broadcasters might have reason to be concerned, as might broadcasters that lean heavily on children’s programming. Nielsen said that about 15 percent of all viewing of English language broadcast networks in prime time takes place on analog-only sets, while analog-only TVs account for fully 26 percent of the viewing of Spanish-olanguage broadcast network. Children and teenagers are more likely than other age groups to use “unready” sets.

One somewhat bright spot in the results is that almost 25 percent of the analog-only sets aren’t being used to watch television at all. They’re connected to DVD players and video game consoles.

The full report is available online: blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/dtv_update_2_final_edit3.pdf