The Consumer Electronics Association reports that 44 percent of high-definition television set owners are receiving HD programming now, and that confusion exists among these HD adopters as to whether the programming received is high definition.
The organization's new study "HDTV: You Have the Set, But Do You Have the Content?" also revealed that some of the reasons given by consumers for not taking advantage of HD programming was that they were not interested in the content or that they thought it was too expensive.
Another fact revealed by the study is that one of the primary reasons for purchasing HDTV sets is to improve movie viewing or gaming experiences, not for watching ordinary television programming. The study said that nearly 40 percent of households purchasing HDTV equipment connected it with video gaming and surround sound systems.
CEA said that 66 percent of HDTV set owners receive HD programming via cable, 27 percent opted for satellite delivery, 8 percent elected to receive HD content off-air, and of the remaining 6 percent, half (3 percent) get content via optical delivery and the other half pulls HD from the Internet. The organization said that these trends indicate that acquisition of HD content "is not resulting in a migration to or from any one television-programming provider."
The study was designed and formulated by CEA Market Research and was based on a telephone sampling done between April 10 and April 24, 2007 of 2,508 U.S. adults.
CEA predicts that 16 million HDTV sets will be sold in the U.S. by the end of this year, and that this should swell total set ownership to 52.5 million. CEA is predicting that these sales will raise the overall percentage of U.S. households with high-definition from the current 30 percent to 36 percent.
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