Nielsen: 98.9% of U.S. Homes Can Get DTV Signal

Nielsen says that 98.9% of U.S. homes are able to receive a digital TV signal.

That is up 229,000 homes and 1.3 million since the June 12 switch-over to digital broadcasting.

That leaves 1.1% or a little over a million homes still without a DTV set or DTV-to analog converter box or cable or satellite service.

Nielsen has even begun expressing it as that "glass-mostly-full" readiness figure. In previous announcements, it had led with the percentage of unready, rather than ready, homes.

At last look, converter boxes were still being applied for at about 35,000 a day, though on average only a little over half were actually being redeemed, so that unreadiness number continues to drop.

Among the takeaways from Nielsen's latest figures is that income remains a factor in DTV uptake. More than half (54%) of the still-unready homes make less than $25,000 a year.

And while broadband is becoming a growing destination for video, most of the DTV unready homes don't have that as an alternative. That's because 60.7% of those homes don't have Internet access, according to the ratings company.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.