TV Licensing has released figures that show 6,000 U.K. homes still have only a black-and-white television licence.
The Guardian makes the further point that in direct contrast, half of all
homes now have their tv connected to wi-fi for streaming services.
Read the whole story at The Guardian »
Could that also possibly mean that 6,000 homes have colour TV but don't want to pay the extra 100 pounds each year?
John, I understand that some U.S. homes, like their UK counterparts, also use monochrome receivers--a few dating back to the days of "Mad Man Muntz"---one of the early TV set manufacturers. These sets are over 70 years old and I doubt that they work very well---but their die hard users don't seem to mind. Most live in distant mountain areas and never travel far from their abodes. They don't even know about cable---so they will be the last to "cut the cord" as they have no cords to cut--- and are even less likely have heard of Netflix, HBO, Disney Plus, etc. I estimate that there are 10,291 of these homes which contain 85,887 people---these tend to be large families but I haven't tried to break these figures down by towns or counties as going into these areas can be dangerous for one's health. I wonder if Nielsen includes any of these monochrome-only viewers in its panel---but I doubt it.
Ed, taking you very precise counts as gospel ...
10k TV homes out of 120m is 0.0083% of TV homes. Put another way, 1 in 12,000 homes would be just B&W. The latest household panel count I could find for Nielsen was 37k, so I would guess that at best there would be a few homes in the national panel.
86k people out of 307m is 0.028% of the population, or 1 in 3,500 people. They quote 100k people (though I think that could be an old number) so maybe 30 or so people.
Technically a B&W set is the same as a colour set as the system relies on audio matching. But it also relies on mobile phone coverage to get the data, which would knock several out.