I just completed a study of OTA HH in the US using data from Nielsen Media
(which you can find market-by-market under the research tab on the TVB site)
and the FCC, updating one from three years ago. Like most such studies, the
In-Stat estimate of 13% fails to account for the roughly 1% of HH that
subscribe to both wired cable and ADS (largely DBS), so the "OTA exclusives"
should be 14%. It also does not account for a larger but unknown number
"OTA supplementals," those in ADS households who use OTA for local channels
or for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. sets in their home.
The OTA exclusives number has fallen nearly 4 million households since the
earlier study (almost entirely due to DBS growth fueled by
local-into-local), but that still leaves sizable OTA-exclusive numbers. Los
Angeles has 20.6% OTA exclusives -- 1,139,000 homes.
Harlingen-Weslaco-Brownsville-McAllen TX has 37.9%, El Paso
TX-Las Cruces NM 32.7%, and Boise ID 30.8% OTA exclusives.
A complete chart of the market-by-market numbers is linked to a blog posting
I made summarizing this at
http://technology360.typepad.com/technology360/2006/12/estimating_tv_o.html
.
I'm GM of two PBS stations in Washington State, and therefore definitely
have a dog in this fight, but to the point of Bob's quote from Chairman
Powell, there is a public policy element to this that goes to the economic
viability of free OTA television. In a world with dying newspapers and an
increasing spread of economic circumstances among our country's residents,
the idea of some source other than paid satellite-fed TV seems to be worth
protecting. Research on the public television side has shown that the
economic value of OTA households is *way* larger to stations than that of
cable homes, so presumably that's the case for commercial stations as well.
Bob's long-time criticism of ATSC has been spot-on (a decade of DTV has gone
by and I just bought my first ATSC set-top box, a 5th-gen chip Samsung, that
can get Spokane stations 60 miles from my home). It may very well be too
late to salvage free OTA television, but that's what we're protecting.
Dennis
