HD Sales Continue in Wake of World Cup

In Europe, where the quadrennial World Cup soccer tourney is more widely followed than in North America, sales of new DTV sets last winter and spring to watch the month-long cup in HD were said to be brisk, if not quite as dramatic as had been widely predicted a year ago. Now new research from GfK indicates while sales did slow a bit after the early summer competition, the HD market is still doing quite well.

GfK said more than 80 percent of all plasma sets sold (and virtually all LCD TV units) are now HD ready, and there will be 2.4 million households with HD sets in the U.K. by the end of this year. That means nearly 10 percent of all households will have an HD-ready set by the end of 2006 (compared to 2 percent in the U.K. at the beginning of the year, and more than 20 percent in North America).

Analyst GfK is part of The GfK Group, headquartered in Nuremburg, Germany.