According to The Nielsen Company, more than 9 million households are not ready for the upcoming transition to all-digital broadcasting and would be unable to receive any television programming at all if the transition occurred today. Another 12.6 million households have at least one television set that will no longer work when the digital transition occurs, meaning that nearly one in five U.S. households are either partially or completely unready for the transition.

Under government-mandated action, all television stations are required to switch to digital programming in February 2009. In a research paper released today, Nielsen reported that the number of fully unprepared homes decreased 1.4 percentage points from May 1 to September 1, 2008, leaving 8.4% of all U.S. households still completely unready.

Nielsen also found that nearly a quarter of all “unready” analogue sets are not being used to view regular television. These sets, which are in both partially and completely unprepared homes, are being used for DVD, VCR and Video Games.

Categories: Articles, Research