Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Standard-Definition TV Still 80% of Viewing

Some might be perplexed to find that about 80 percent of U.S. television viewing is of content in standard definition, not high definition.

Though some 56 percent of U.S. households own HDTV sets, only 13 percent of total day viewing on cable and 19 percent of viewing on broadcast television is “true HD” viewing, which requires an HD television and HD tuner that are tuned to an HD channel.

About 44 percent of homes either do not have an HDTV set or an HD service. Also, because most HDTV-owning homes have at least one non-HDTV set, about a third of total programming is viewed on a standard set.

Even on HD sets, about 20 percent of viewing is through non-HDTV feeds.

None of those statistics should be so surprising, however. Some types of programming, especially sports, really show the value of the higher-definition. But other types of programming, such as news, actually do not provide a similar level of value, one might argue.

Also, not all programming created in standard definition has been up-converted to HDTV format. There are other elements at work, as well. HDTV adds lots of value when a viewer is looking at a large, flat-screen display. The picture clarity is harder to appreciate on a smaller screen, and lots of TV viewing still occurs on smaller screens.

In fact, even beyond that, one can argue that multiple, independent value drivers are at work. Flat screens are attractive to end users for reasons having to do with form factor, irrespective of whether the content is displayed in HD format.

Even the shape of an HDTV receiver, with the different 16:9 aspect ratio, seems to strike most users as better than the 4:3 aspect ratio of a standard definition set. So some value is obtained simply by swapping 4:3 screens for 16:9 screens. Likewise, people prefer bigger screens to smaller screens. Not all those values are always directly linked to HD image resolution.

Then there is the issue of playback peripherals. There still are huge numbers of non-HDTV DVD players in regular use, and image resolution still seems for most people to be quite acceptable. Likewise, digital video recorders similarly add value for reasons having nothing to do with the actual matter of HDTV signal delivery.

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