About 1.45 million new subscribers to multichannel video entertainment services—possibly as many as 1.85 million—are up for grabs between now and February 2009, if the findings of a recent survey sponsored by the Association of Public Television Stations is correct.
In some ways these 1.45 million subscribers are the toughest of all customers to get: people who are not today subscribers to any service and who get all their TV signals over the air.
Such customers include "never nevers," people who say they never have bought cable, satellite or other forms of subscription TV and say they never will.
The APTS survey found that 62 percent of the remaining 14.5 million "over the air TV" households prefer to buy a decoder box or a new digital TV rather than become subscribers to any multichannel video service.
About 10 percent of respondents surveyed say they will sign up for service rather than stick with over-the-air.
Still, some 17.5 percent of over-the-air consumers who are aware of the transition “don’t know” what they will do and roughly 10 percent said they would “do nothing.”
Assume those responses accurately reflect the feelings of the base of users. Assume that 10 percent of those respondents ultimately opt for a video service. That's another 400,000 new video subscribers.
Also, despite fears that consumers are not aware of the coming transition to digital TV, the survey found that 76.4 percent of respondents were aware of the coming change. That's up from 55 percent as recently as November 2007.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration's program of giving away discount coupons for purchases of decoders has lead to requests for 8,067,272 coupons from 4,267,828 households, as of March 19, 2008.
Given that there are about 112 million U.S. TV households, the entire over-the-air broadcasting business (the access, not the content) is being run for 13 percent of the households, all others getting those same signals from a multichannel video services provider.
Some people might argue that is an increasingly dysfunctional use of spectrum.
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Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is Level the Playing Field With Business VoIP, brought to you by Speakeasy (News - Alert)
Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page. Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
| IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
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