As holiday season expectations heat up for sales of HDTV sets and associated products, retailers, broadcasters and the cable industry hope increased floor traffic and newly launched transition information campaigns will lead to better-educated consumers.
The Consumer Electronics Association expects $48.1 billion in retail sales for the fourth quarter. Of this, about 28 percent ($13.5 billion) is expected from sales of audio video products such as TVs, DVD players, VCRs, and home theater equipment, according to spokeswoman Becca Hatton. CEA data indicates that “any type of TV” ranked in the top five wish list items for all adult survey respondents. A concurrent Solutions Research Group study indicated that a third of the Americans it surveyed would like a flat-screen HDTV for Christmas.
THE INTELLIGENCE GAP
Yet despite the cravings, survey after survey indicates that consumers don’t know what HDTV is, let alone the implications of an end-of-TV-as-they-know-it scenario. A recent Best Buy survey reported that although it expected that more than 52 million U.S. households would own an HDTV by year’s end, 41 percent of current HDTV owners “said they understand little to nothing at all about HDTV.”
The NAB has a multiplatform digital-TV-education campaign valued at an estimated $697 million. As a follow-up to a general education program it launched in January, the NAB’s agenda includes PSAs, crawls and news tickers, speeches to community groups, a DTV Road Show, and banner ads on Web sites.
The NAB initiative follows on the heels of a $200 million campaign announced by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association in September.
Meanwhile, the FCC announced a lineup of DTV educational workshops leading up to the analog shutoff in February 2009, and Congress held hearings last month to debate the government’s DTV consumer education efforts, with some legislators calling for the formation of a DTV Task Force to coordinate efforts.
Source: TV Technology, 11/07/07
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