Tom Butts / 07.11.2012 03:00PM
Trending Up
I’m not a fan of tired
ole clichés but humor
me on this one.
I’m only going to say it
once: to paraphrase an
old saying, “rumors of
the demise of broadcast
television have been
greatly exaggerated.”
We’ve seen the signs
for months, even years. Sales of over the air
antennas have greatly increased; Antennas
Direct, one of the nation’s leading providers
of TV antennas says its sales have effectively
doubled every nine months over the
past several years. Been to a Best Buy lately?
Check out their growing retail TV antenna
section if you want to really see what’s happening.
These facts are now being backed up by
the results of a recent survey released by
NAB last month. According to new research
by GfK Media, one of the world’s largest research
companies, the number of Americans
now relying on over-the-air TV has increased
to almost 54 million, up from 46 million just
a year ago.
Who are these revolutionaries who dare
to buck the pay-TV trend? Not surprisingly,
the demographics of broadcast-only houses
skew towards minorities and lower income
families, but you can also count younger
adults as well. Many of these are referred to
as the “cord nevers,” most of them combining
free broadcast TV with over-the-top services
like Roku, Netflix and Xbox. A recent
survey from Nielsen backs this up, showing
that the number of homes with broadcastonly
TV and OTTP grew almost 23 percent
over the past year.
The GfK Media
survey, “2012 Ownership
Survey and Trend
Report,” found that
17.8 percent of all U.S.
households with TVs
use over-the-air signals
to watch TV, compared
to 15 percent reported
as broadcast only in
2011. Overall, GfK estimates
that almost 21
million households representing 53.8 million
consumers get their television exclusively
over the air.
“As we’ve seen for the past few years,
over-the-air households continue to make
up a sizeable portion of the television viewing
landscape,” said David Tice, senior vice
president, GfK Media. “Our research reveals
that over-the-air broadcasting remains an important
distribution platform of television
programming.”
 |
| ClearStream digital antenna |
The survey also revealed that six percent
of TV households—approximately 6.9 million
households, eliminated pay-TV service
in their current home at some point in the
past and now rely on terrestrial broadcast
rather than pay-TV. This is up from four percent
of TV households, which had eliminated
pay-TV service at some point in the past
in the research firm’s 2011 study.
Minorities make up 44 percent of all
broadcast-only homes, up from 40 percent
in 2011 and homes headed by younger
adults—24 percent of those
households with a head of the
household 18-34—are broadcast
only, up from 17 percent
last year. Twenty six percent of
households with an annual income
under $30,000 receive TV
exclusively over-the-air.
These TV viewers have decided
that pay-TV isn’t always
worth the price. Another survey,
released in late June from deal
aggregation website TechBargains.com
noted that 33 percent of cable and satellite
subscribers who have cut the cord said
they would never sign up again even if pay
TV providers “drastically” reduced their
prices.
Naysayers will continue to discount such
survey results, conveniently forgetting that
it’s not necessarily the numbers, but the
trends, which all continue to go up. Hopefully,
as broadcasters continue to roll out
new services, including more DTV channels
and Mobile DTV, many viewers will discover,
while others will be reminded, of how important
a robust, flexible broadcast system is
to our nation’s media landscape.
In this issue, we welcome a new member
to our roster of industry experts. Al Kovalick,
who I’m sure many of you know, will be taking
over our “Count on IT” column.
I’ve known Al for many years and have
always enjoyed our conversations on the future
of broadcast and its relationship with
information technology. Al has an impressive
pedigree, with 20 years of experience
in video systems design, workflow evaluation
and analysis. He wrote the first book in
the field on converged AV + IT systems and
file-based workflows (“Video Systems in an
IT Environment; The Basics of Networked
Media and File-Based Workflows;” see www.AVITbook.com for more information). Currently
Al is the principal at Media Systems
Consulting in Silicon Valley. Before that he
was Technical Strategist and Avid Fellow at
Avid Technology, CTO for Pinnacle Systems
and Chief Architect of Video Servers at HP. Al
is also a SMPTE Fellow and was awarded the
SMPTE David Sarnoff Medal in 2009.