Nielsen: One In Five Homes Still Not Ready For Digital

With less than nine months before the U.S. television industry converts to digital broadcast spectrum, 22% of households are still either completely or partially unready for the conversion, according to findings of a report scheduled to be released today by Nielsen Co. The report, a version of which was released to clients last month (MediaDailyNews May 1), concludes that 9.4% of U.S. households are completely unready, and that the transition risks a significant number of TV viewing hours being displaced begging on Feb. 17, 2009, when the nation's analog-only sets will go dark.

The report estimates that daily tuning among the "completely unready" population represents 6.9 hours on average, and currently accounts for about 7.5% of all daily television viewing, and 8.1% of all prime-time viewing.

Looked at on the basis of total television sets - including secondary sets in households where the primary set are currently digital ready - Nielsen estimates that 16.5% are not ready to receive digital broadcast signals. Completely unready households have an average of 2.7 sets per household, while partially unready households have an average of 4.7 sets.

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The Nielsen report, "The February 2009 Digital Television Transition," does not project how many of the currently unready sets or households will be prepared by the transition date - either by trading up to new, digital-capable TVs, or by acquiring a digital TV converter box - but it paints a potentially disruptive scenario for the TV industry, assuming they are not.

In fact, Nielsen already has taken steps to delay the February Sweeps in 2009 to the month of March to provide more time to deal with the dislocation that could occur in hundreds of thousands of diary households that are the basis for local TV ratings, and advertising rates in many local TV markets (MDN May 1).

According to the new Nielsen report, some markets are better prepared than others. Among the 56 local metered markets, for example, communities like Milwaukee (18.3% of sets completely unready), Salt Lake City (18.0%) and Portland, Or. (17.3%), the dislocation could be significant. In others - including some of the biggest markets such as Hartford-New Haven (3.1%), New York (3.8%), and Atlanta (4.1%), the effects are likely to be less pronounced.

Demographically, the Nielsen report spells another potential problem, noting that the least prepared audience segment are men 18- to 24-years-old, a group that is of especially high demand among some advertisers, and one that has been particularly vexing for Nielsen to measure in the past. According to the new Nielsen report, these young men are 27% more unready for the transition than the rest of the U.S. population.

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