On 3/6/2011 1:34 AM, Brenda Ann wrote:

The conversion of stations has slowed dramatically because of this,

The conversion of stations has slowed because you can only convert once!
The majority of major market stations have already converted. Smaller
stations will take their time.

since it's less than a 1% penetration of the market. Compare this with
something over 500,000,000 analog radios currently in use. And those are
not going away.

The big increase in HD receivers will come as sales of vehicles with HD
receivers takes off. Toyota just announced, and Ford is in production,
along with a bunch of smaller manufacturers like VW and BMW. It's very
similar to how FM radio evolved--once FM receivers became standard
equipment, or a low cost option, FM radio took off.

The one fear is that what happened to FM will happen to HD, when it
becomes popular. I don't know how many people remember early FM radio,
but it was a home to less top-40 genres and more alternative formats,
and because of the low penetration of receivers there was not so much
advertising. That's where we are today with HD. My favorite HD2 station
runs no advertising at all, it's completely supported by the FM/HD1 station.

Clearly the broadcasters would like to monetize HD, but that's several
years out. The broadcasters that converted early did so with a long term
view of the advantages of digital radio. It doesn't cost much to add
digital at a 1% power level, so it's not like they were investing a huge
amount of money in the technology. The big question for broadcasters now
is this "what percentage of the listening public must have HD receivers
in order for it to make sense for us to increase digital power to 10%?"
A 10x power increase is going to cost some real money.

As an aside, it was figured that as prices dropped on flat panel
televisions that their market penetration would reach over 90% after
analog was shut off.

No, it was never expected that flat panels would quickly reach 90% of
the installed base. Anyone with digital cable or satellite had no need
to even get a converter. Flat panels did quickly reach nearly 100% of
new sales.

people I know personally, not those in some newgroup or another) I don't
know anyone with a flatscreen TV that isn't still watching more than 2/3
of what they watch in analog or digital 480i, mostly because the cable
companies are charging for anything HD that they make available, even
the OTA local channels.

I have Dish Network (much less expensive than cable or DirecTV) and they
do not charge for HD ("for life") if you agree to paperless billing (or
if you pay them a one-time $99 fee).
http://www.dishnetwork.com/packages/free-hdtv/default.aspx. Those that
are still on cable have more money than sense, or they want broadband
internet from the cable company so they also get their TV from them. I
did get a flat panel HDTV when my 1987 Toshiba 27" CRT television
stopped working last year (on/off relay controlled by remote control
stopped working). I could have repaired it (replaced the relay before
myself once), but I thought 23 years was a reasonable expectation of
service.