TVs and Landline Phones Not Seen as Necessities by Growing Number of Users

The television set and the landline telephone are suffering from a sharp decline in reported public perception that they are necessities of life, say researchers at the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project.

Just 42 percent of Americans say they consider the television set to be a necessity, according to a new nationwide survey from the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project. Last year, this figure was 52 percent. In 2006, it was 64 percent.

The drop-off has been less severe for the landline telephone. Some 62 percent of Americans say it’s a necessity of life, down from 68 pecent last year. Also, some 47 percent of respondents say that the mobile phone is a necessity of life.

One might question whether actual behavior tracks what respondents are saying, though. Though there has to have been concern about an actual decline in the total number of subscribers to multichannel TV services in the second quarter of 2010, there has been no break in the long-term growth trend line for multichannel video subscriptions, says Michael Turk, a political and communications consultant.

He chalks up the second quarter decline of 711,000 total industry subscribers as an artifact of "artificially" higher sign-ups as the broadcast digital TV transition occurred, a process that lead to higher-than-typical signups, followed by slower demand in the aftermath, but well within the historical growth profile.

Also, for the 2010-2011 broadcast season, Nielsen estimates the total number of TV households in the U.S. will climb to 115.9 million, an increase of one million homes from last year. Nielsen also estimates an increase of more than two million persons age two and older in U.S. TV households, for a total of 294,650,000 people.

It is less possible to argue with behavior related to landline telephone subscriptions, where survey respondent attitudes tend to be reflected in the data on buying of those services.
The general understanding is that people are ditching landline phone service, and there is evidence that perhaps 25 percent of U.S. households now do not use fixed-line telephone service.

But the data is quite inconsistent, at first glance. The telephone subscribership penetration rate in the United States was 96 percent, an actual increase of 0.4 percent over the rate from March 2009, and the highest reported rate since the agency began collecting this data in November 1983, according to the Industry Analysis and Technology Division of the Wireline Competition Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission.

But there is a catch. The Industry Analysis and Technology Division of the Wireline Competition Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission includes both mobile and fixed voice connections within its definition. So this measure of overall voice penetration, per household, while accurate enough, does not specificially show what is happening in terms of fixed-line penetration.

Other FCC reports do show a decline of fixed line services in use over time. So what does seem clear is that people are backing up their attitudes with behavior. Their reported attitudes about televisions, though, do not seem supported by the data.

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