Nielsen: Month After DTV Switch, 1.3% of Country Unready for Digital

1.5 million don't have DTV set or converter box hooked up, but numbers lowering

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/16/2009 11:16:07 AM

According to Nielsen, 1.5 million TV households, or 1.3% of the country, were unready for DTV as of July 12, a month after the June 12 transition date.

That is down 200,000 households from the 1.7 million households that weren't ready two weeks before, according to the latest Nielsen figures.

Nielsen defines unready as homes that rely on over-the-air TV and don't have a digital TV set or a DTV-to-analog set-top converter hooked up.

It was Nielsen's 5 million homes-plus unreadiness figure back in January and early February that many in Congress used to buttress their arguments for moving the DTV hard date to June 12.