Re: the discussion about how many households continue to rely on OTA. I've made frequent attempts to track this number here in Canada, using similar data, and have found it to be be difficult for several reasons: 1. The numbers reported often fail to distinguish carefully between "households", "subscribers" and "customers", and 2. It's impossible to get anything accurate on the "Stealing" phenomenon 3. Who knows what the cabsat overlap actually is? #1 is the worst problem, and I suspect it happens becuase the people reporting statistics are the cable and satellite companies, who often have an agenda they are supporting. Meanwhile, there is no interest group arguing for OTA. In terms of penetration, households is the only useful unit of measurement. But the reports of various parties often include other customers - hospitals, hotels, restaurants, bars, schools, and other institutions. There are a lot of these non-household subscribers, and if they are included, and the total compared against national households, it exaggerates cabsat penetration. In using cable stats, I've always had to go to the source to separate the institutional subs, and to make sure I'm not using "percentage of homes passed", which can be a very misleading figure. I note that the table quoted (Chart 10 in http://www.ncta.com/pdf_files/Overview.pdf) uses the term "customers". That tells you right away that it can't be compared to households. Chart 11, evidently based on an FCC report, uses the term households but provides no figures, only a graph. I'm not even sure this is correct - I'm no expert on the FCC, but I note that Bruce Leichtman reports that the FCC report cited in Chart 11 does not distinguish between households and subscribers. (See: his article at http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=6373. For a general discussion of these stats, see his previous article at http://www.leichtmanresearch.com/press/020503article.html) Also, two subscriptions in one household may be counted as two customers (one subscriber) and can look like two households. The overlap between cable and satellite is real and is often estimated here at 2% of total HH. When I do my best to make a real apples-to-apples comparison, I am usually surprised to discover how many households still rely on OTA. Cabsat penetration has often been exaggerated by as much as 10%. I also find that when you use viewing stats to measure actual usage - i.e. % of viewing hours received on an OTA antenna, it's remarkable how much viewing an individual station or OTA network is still receiving from antennas. This viewing combines "uncommected" households, second sets in cabsast HH that are using antennas, or switching to antenna to get a local station that isn't on satellite. None of this is to say that the OTA audience has not declined substantially over the last ten years - it clearly has - it's just a caution about the use of the available stats to calculate the number of OTA HH by subtracting the cabsat numbers from total HH. David Keeble ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.