Craig Birkmaier posted: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6495849.html?display=Breaking +News&referral=SUPP&nid=2228 Lots of figures being thrown about there. It seems exactly the same as the frenzy a couple of years ago that people were still buying standard CRT TVs in droves. Or longer ago, that HDTVs would be too expensive for the mass market. All for the sake of drama, all ignoring the obvious trend lines. And, of course, all that drama proved wrong. Buried toward the end of the article is the meaningful information: "That 82% usage number, frankly, is far more surprising than Nielsen's HDTV household estimate, as it would suggest a much higher adoption of HDTV content among HD set-owners than even the most optimistic network programmers and engineers would claim. When repeatedly asked for further clarification, a Nielsen spokesman stood by the numbers. But he added that Nielsen had actually found that some 21% of U.S. households, or 23.6 million, have HD displays but not necessarily tuners. "Using that larger number from Nielsen -- which inexplicably was not included in its press release -- means that only 53.8% (the aforementioned 12.7 million) of HDTV-display owners are using them to consume HD content. That usage number falls more in line with CEA research and other industry studies." The real bottom line here is that (a) virtually all new sets sold are in fact HDTV sets these days, and (b) more than half of these are now, and WILL be, used to watch HDTV. So whatever the current snapshot in time might say about US households watching HDTV now, the inescapable fact from this article is that we are trending to at least a 50 percent figure of HDTV usage by US households, which is huge. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.