[opendtv] Re: Why aren't there more converter boxes?

  • From: Mark Schubin <tvmark@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:59:42 -0500



Craig Birkmaier wrote:
VHS IS DEAD.
You have an interesting view of "dead." According to CEA's latest household-penetration statistics, 85% of U.S. homes have a stand-alone VCR, admittedly down from 90% last year; 36% have a TV/VCR combo, which is UP from 35% last year.
What has installed base got to do with it. The real question is how many new units are being sold.
According to CEA, 815,000 new, stand-alone VCR decks were sold to U.S. dealers in 2006. For what it's worth, that was slightly more than the number of caller-ID systems, an even greater gap over the number of portable audio tape players (with or without radios), about eight times more than the number of B&W TVs, and 100 times more than the number of rack audio systems. More than two million "analog combinations" (including TV/VCR) were also sold in 2006, about twice as many as "digital combinations" and more than twice as many as front projectors. Some $345 million of blank videocassettes were sold last year; a whole lot of businesses that consider themselves very much alive can only dream of such revenues.

By the way, about five thousand "analog projection TVs" (by CEA's definition having neither digital-reception capability nor the capability to deal with at least 480p signals) were sold in 2006. I'd say that's certainly a dying category (down from 681,000 in 2002), but it's not quite dead yet.

TTFN,
Mark




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