98.9% Of U.S. Homes Can Get DTV Signal: Nielsen
Little More Than 1 million Homes Remain Without Set, Converter Box, Cable, Satellite
John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 7/30/2009 1:59:20 PM
Nielsen says that 98.9% of U.S. homes are able to receive a digital TV signal.
That is up 229,000 homes and 1.3 million since the June 12 switch-over to digital broadcasting.
That leaves 1.1% or a little over a million homes still without a DTV set or DTV-to analog converter box or cable or satellite service.
Nielsen has even begun expressing it as that "glass-mostly-full" readiness figure. In previous announcements, it had led with the percentage of unready, rather than ready, homes.
At last look, converter boxes were still being applied for at about 35,000 a day, though on average only a little over half were actually being redeemed, so that unreadiness number continues to drop.
Among the takeaways from Nielsen's latest figures is that income remains a factor in DTV uptake. More than half (54%) of the still-unready homes make less than $25,000 a year.
And while broadband is becoming a growing destination for video, most of the DTV unready homes don't have that as an alternative. That's because 60.7% of those homes don't have Internet access, according to the ratings company.
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