The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition. Amanda D. Lotz
Diffusion, 2005 and 2013
| Spring 2005 (%) | Fall 2013 (%) | |
| Sets | ||
| Homes with television | 100 | 95.8 |
| Homes with 3 or more sets | 45 | 67 |
| Signals | ||
| Homes with cable | 67 | 54 |
| Homes with digital satellite | 20 | 31 |
| Homes with telco signal | n/a | 10 |
| Total multi-channel | 87 | 92 |
| Homes with only over-the-air reception | 14 | ~9 |
| Channels and Devices | ||
| Homes receiving 40 or more channels | 82 | unknown |
| Homes receiving 100 or more channels | 40 | 58 (in 2008)a |
| Homes with a VCR | 87 | 55 |
| Homes with a DVD player | 76 | 83 |
| Homes with a video game system | 39 | 56 |
| Homes with high-definition TV | 9b | 83 capable |
| Homes with a digital video recorder | 7b | 49 |
| Homes with a computer | 67b | 80 (Internet connected)c |
| Homes with a mobile phone | 72b | 87 |
| Smartphones (of mobile phone population) | n/a | 65 |
| Tablet | n/a | 29 |
| E-book reader | n/a | 26d |
| Homes online | 59b | 72c, d |
| Homes with broadband connection | 28b | 70c |
Sources: Unless otherwise indicated, data from Nielsen Media Research. Fall 2013 data from “An Era of Growth: The Cross-Platform Report,” March 2014, or “The Digital Consumer,” February 2014; 2005 data pulled from Npower for 15 May 2005 and based on total U.S. homes with a television.
aNielsen Media Research, “Average U.S. Home Now Receives a Record 118.6 TV Channels,” 6 June 2008, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2008/average_u_s__home.html.
bKnowledge Networks Statistical Research, “The Home Technology Monitor: Spring 2005 Ownership and Trend Report” (Crawford, NJ: Knowledge Networks SRI, 2005). The survey uses a telephone sampling method, so the data are figured from a base of telephone households with one or more working television sets.
cNielsen reports 8 percent more homes with Internet-connected computers than does Pew; I’m not sure which report is more in error.
dPew Internet and American Life Project, “Three Technology Revolutions,” http://www.pewinternet.org/Trend-Data-(Adults)/Device-Ownership.aspx.
By 2005, a multi-channel norm was clearly in place, with 87 percent of television households receiving signals from a non–over-the-air source, 67 percent of which subscribed to cable and 20 percent to satellite. Cable maintained its dominant status in 2013, though it had lost share to the telco providers—AT&T and Verizon—that began competing in selected markets with a fiber-to-the-home product. Only 19 percent of television households subscribed to digital cable in 2005, although it was available to 85 percent of wired cable homes.16 By 2012, 81 percent of cable households subscribed to digital cable.17 Digital cable allowed for advanced and two-way signal transmission between cable providers and homes that enabled more robust video-on-demand offerings and eventually, DVRs using cloud-based storage. Eighty-two percent of television homes received more than forty channels, and 40 percent received more than one hundred in 2005, a figure that increased to 58 percent by 2008. Arguably counting channels was never a good indicator of the range of content people might view. Nielsen reported in 2014 that “the average U.S. TV home now receives 189 TV channels” but watches an average of only 17 channels.18 Once broadband-distributed video became widely available around 2010, counting channels became an even less informative indicator.
The penetration of convenience devices provides one of the most marked shifts between 2005 and 2013. VCR ownership continued to decline in 2005, and was down to 87 percent. By contrast, and unsurprisingly, ownership of DVD players continued to increase, with 76 percent of homes owning a DVD player in 2005. Despite the omnipresence of DVRs in industry discussions by 2005, only 7 percent of homes had the device, which marked an increase from 4 percent in 2004.19 DVR penetration began to grow much more rapidly once the devices were integrated into the set-top boxes provided by the companies providing cable service, typically for a monthly fee. (Henceforth, the companies that provide video service—whether by cable, fiber, or satellite—will be noted as MVPDs, the common industry acronym that stands for multi-channel video programming distributor.) Twenty-six percent of homes reported they had access to video-on-demand (VOD) services in 2005, but only 11 percent reported viewing a free or pay VOD program in the previous month; the title availability at this point was most limited and emphasized theatrical film content.20 The transition to digital cable led to greater availability of the service between 2007 and 2011. Only 37 percent of homes had set-top boxes that enabled VOD in 2008, but they were in 60 percent of households by 2013.21 Notable expansion in VOD content availability and then use occurred around 2011; the measurement service Rentrak reported that free television VOD increased more than 40 percent in 2012 from the previous year.22 In 2005, 39 percent of television households owned a video game system that attached to the television. This distribution level had been steady since 2000, but began increasing as the devices added Internet connections that expanded the range of activities gaming systems could be used for and newer-generation systems such as the Wii introduced controllers allowing motion control gaming, which also expanded the gaming audience.23
In terms of the broader home technology space in 2005, 67 percent of homes had a computer, while 23 percent owned two or more, and patterns of growth in home computer ownership suggested that demand had nearly reached equilibrium.24 Eighty-eight percent of computer households (59 percent of all households) used the computer to go online, a use level that remained steady since 2001. Fifty-two percent of online households connected through a regular telephone line,