5 Percent of Households Switch to Pay Services

Rich Emery sent us this one today...which is very interesting.

According to this article from Multichannel News, 5 percent of households surveyed by research firm Knowledge Networks switched to a pay TV service such as cable or satellite.

From the link:

According to Nielsen, there are about 114 million U.S. TV households; 5% of those would represent 5.7 million homes. Knowledge Networks surveyed 2,498 TV households nationwide via telephone from Feb. 20 to April 11, with a margin of error of 2% for questions asked of the total sample.

Of those surveyed, 18% said they had bought a digital converter for an analog TV to receive digital signals; 8% bought a digital TV or an HDTV set specifically in preparation for the transition; and 5% started a new pay TV subscription, also specifically in anticipation of the switch to all-digital broadcasts. (The numbers do not add up to 26% because there is some overlap among the groups.)

It goes to show how much people are trying to prepare for the switch to DTV next week...

And by the way, the same survey also showed that 91 percent of those surveyed were aware of the switch to DTV. But you'd think that number would be a LOT higher, given the number of ads on TV lately!