2. Why no Buy?

So back to our original question: why didn't folks snap up HDTV sets in Europe, the Americas and ROW for the World Cup like they did for the Super Bowl?

Well, pretty much every set sold in Japan and the rest of Asia for the past two years has been digital. (And at the prices they charge over there, those folks really like their TV !) Europeans have been slow to buy the sets because there aren't that many shows in HighDef - little content, little need. The World Cup helped a little, but seeing that all of the pubs had the matches in HighDef - why stay home? Canada has a lot of HD content options (most pay-for-view) but the sets and HD PVRs are very expensive.

In the U.S., it is estimated that less than 10% of households will have HDTV by the end of the year. Put another way, most TV set owners find the quality of content they are viewing is, well, good enough. In fact when they pull the plug on analog TV on February 17, 2009 it is estimated that upwards of 20% of the households still won't have HDTV sets. Unless content quality becomes a lot better and HDTV prices drop dramatically there will be more than that off the HighDef bandwagon.

In Central and Southern America, countries are still arguing about which format and standard to use. Even then, prices are out of reach for more than 80% of the population - the price of a set is almost twice the price in the US.

But these minor issues haven't slowed the set manufacturers. They continue ramping up new plasma and LCD plants as rapidly as possible in Korea, Japan and China.

iSuppli, one of many research firms tracking the TV market, projects solid growth in LCD sets and modest growth for plasma screens (Figure 1). Good, but hardly the demand needed to keep all those new production lines running profitably.

Figure 1: TV Demand Projection (click to enlarge)

One of the problems is that today people have more video choices. We've got mobile video (increasingly 3G), IPTV, video iPod, PSP, smartphone, digital TV, POT (plain old TV) and PC/broadband (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Video Content Delivery Channels

Options don't mean much to Baby Boomers who have the HDTV set permanently implanted in the center of their entertainment environment. Gen X, Y, Z buyers, however, are extremely comfortable with viewing content on their PC and mobile whatever. On the PC, HighDef matters but on your mobile device - iPod, PSP, smartphone - who cares?

Digital video screen and device sales are going to continue to grow steadily (Figure 3), but the mix of screen size seems to be shifting to personal and portable devices.

Figure 3: Flat Panel Digital TV shipments (click to enlarge)

While the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) has finally launched a consumer education program for HDTV, most people still don't understand when big box store clerks go into their song and dance. Superbly sharp, clean, crisp viewing enjoyment ... compared to what ????

Consumer studies like StrategyOne's of US HDTV owners have found that:

28% of the owners believed picture quality was higher with their HDTV set 23% believed that the message in the lower left of the screen saying the show was broadcast in HD so quality was already there 18% believed that the HDTV set would give them HD channels without added equipment 14% said that the salesperson told them the set was all they needed