I've been doing a lot of research lately on the upcoming digital television transition in February 2009. There's been a lot of articles lately on the subject, with people trying to gauge the potential impact. Nielsen even submitted US estimates on unready homes, and provided sample estimates for LPM markets. Although these sample estimates are not balanced to any universe estimates, they are estimates, but it gives us an insight to potential impact.
Nielsen places TV households into three categories: Completely Ready (all televisions in the home are digital), Partially Unready (some of the televisions in the home are analog only) and Completely Unready (all televisions in the home are analog only). Nationally, 12.6% of homes are Partially Unready, and 9.4% of homes are Completely Unready. The Tampa-St. Petersburg DMA over-indexes the U.S. average for Partially Unready homes, but under-indexes for Completely Unready Homes.
I'm trying however, to isolate exact how much MY station will be impacted by the switchover. Its all well and good to say 9.2% of the market is unready, but if 20% of my viewing comes from these homes, then I have a bigger problem than most. Nielsen, unfortunately, has not developed a study for this particular question, and as I question industry colleagues, no one else has designed a way to get to this information either. I can't be the first person in the industry to have thought of this question, am I?
To get around this, I've requested a custom report of our ratings for people in the sample that get our signal Over-the-Air only. This is a bit of a false look, as it could include homes that are viewing our over the air signal digitally, and the report excludes homes that are labelled "partially unready", but it is a start.
Anybody else have any ideas?
Monday, June 16, 2008
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