Tom Butts
\nEditor-in-Chief
\ntbutts@nbmedia.com
\nI\u2019m not a fan of tired ole clich\u00e9s but humor me on this one. I\u2019m only going to say it once: to paraphrase an old saying, \u201crumors of the demise of broadcast television have been greatly exaggerated.\u201d<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve seen the signs for months, even years. Sales of over the air antennas have greatly increased; Antennas Direct<\/strong>, one of the nation\u2019s 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\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ccord nevers,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The GfK Media survey, \u201c2012 Ownership Survey and Trend Report,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we\u2019ve seen for the past few years, over-the-air households continue to make up a sizeable portion of the television viewing landscape,\u201d said David Tice, senior vice president, GfK Media. \u201cOur research reveals that over-the-air broadcasting remains an important distribution platform of television programming.\u201d<\/p>\n ClearStream digital antenna Minorities make up 44 percent of all broadcast-only homes, up from 40 percent in 2011 and homes headed by younger adults\u201424 percent of those households with a head of the household 18-34\u2014are 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.<\/p>\n These TV viewers have decided that pay-TV isn\u2019t 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 \u201cdrastically\u201d reduced their prices.<\/p>\n Naysayers will continue to discount such survey results, conveniently forgetting that it\u2019s 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\u2019s media landscape.<\/p>\n In this issue, we welcome a new member to our roster of industry experts. Al Kovalick, who I\u2019m sure many of you know, will be taking over our \u201cCount on IT\u201d column.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve 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 (\u201cVideo Systems in an IT Environment; The Basics of Networked Media and File-Based Workflows;\u201d 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tom Butts Editor-in-Chief tbutts@nbmedia.com I\u2019m not a fan of tired ole clich\u00e9s but humor me on this one. I\u2019m only going to say it once: to paraphrase an old saying, \u201crumors of the demise of broadcast television have been greatly exaggerated.\u201d We\u2019ve seen the signs for months, even years. Sales of over the air antennas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[260,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antenna-update","category-industry-update"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThe survey also revealed that six percent of TV households\u2014approximately 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\u2019s 2011 study.<\/p>\n