CEA: Consumer DTV-Transition Awareness Up

Consumer Electronics Association: 86% of respondents aware of DTV transition, up 12 percentage points from beginning of year.

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/15/2008 9:32:00 AM

Consumer awareness of the digital-TV transition is at 86%, according to new market research, up 12 percentage points from the beginning of the year.

That was the word from the Consumer Electronics Association in advance of a Hill hearing Tuesday on the DTV transition.

According to that research, 32% of households with at least on analog-only over-the-air TV applied for converter boxes, while another 37% know they will have to and plan to do so by year's end. That adds up to 14 million, the CEA said, for which the National Telecommunications and Information Administration should have enough coupons to cover.

The CEA also said the study showed that 90% of people who got the coupons rated the ease of requesting them online as good or excellent, while 81% gave the same rating for finding a store with converter boxes.

There are five months until the Feb. 17, 2009, cutoff of full-power analog signals, but only one day until the various stakeholders in the transition weigh in with the House Telecommunications & Internet Subcommittee on the progress of the converter-box and DTV-education programs, as well as the results from the Wilmington, N.C., early analog cutoff.

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  COUPON ALTERNATIVE: How about a law that gives electronics manufacturers and/or sellers a meaningful TAX BREAK (perhaps something less than dollar-for-dollar) if they make available $40 off coupons for consumers who purchase D-to-A converter boxes OR new digital TV sets? Such a law would relieve the funding burden from taxpayers... and since the coupons could be used for the purchase of either a new digital TV set or a converter box, it would spur electronics sales, a boost to the economy. (The law would contain a provision to ensure that sellers could not inflate the retail price to cover the coupon value.) Wouldn't this have been a better idea in the first place than putting the government in the coupon funding and fulfillment business?

  
  

  
  Vic Livingston, nowpublic.com/scrivener columnist - 9/16/2008 12:12:00 PM EDT
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