• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, May 22, 2007

70% of TV Sets in Cable Households Do Not Have a Set-Top Box

New consumer research from Leichtman Research Group, Inc.  finds that 23% of all TV sets in consumers' homes do not receive cable or Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) programming.  This represents over 70 million TV sets in US households that only receive over-the-air broadcast television.

Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc., said "Just 36% of all TV sets in the U.S. are currently connected to a cable or DBS set-top converter box. With the digital transition now less than two years away, much work clearly still needs to be done to prevent millions of TV sets from going dark in February 2009."

Half of all broadcast-only TV sets are in 15% of primary households nationwide that do not subscribe to cable, DBS, or any other type of multi-channel video service. The other half are in households that subscribe to cable or DBS.   Nine percent of TV sets in cable households are broadcast-only, and 19% of TV sets in DBS households are broadcast-only.

Other related key findings include:

• 70% of all TV sets in cable households are not connected to a set-top box
• 42% of households that subscribe to cable TV do not have any cable set-top boxes
• The mean number of TV sets in digital cable households is 3.1, compared to 2.7 in analog cable households; 2.9 in DBS households (where cable is available); and 2.1 in households that do not subscribe to a TV service

These findings are based on LRG's fifth annual study of this topic, a telephone survey of 1,600 randomly selected households from throughout the United States.