Earlier this week, the CEA sent letters to the leaders of the Senate Commerce and House Energy and Commerce Committee saying that 13 million U.S. households currently depend on analog TV broadcasts. They then followed up with a statement issued Wednesday by CEA President Gary Shapiro in which he declared: “"Clearly, the vast majority of TVs in the United States are not used to view over-the-air television and we can presume that these numbers will diminish as more and more Americans subscribe to pay TV services, including coming technologies such as TV-over-IP, via telephony and even powerline.”
While the CEA data is based on a combination of in-house surveys and publicly stated subscriber numbers from the cable and satellite TV industries, they are vastly different from the official Government Accountability Office's study citing 21 million U.S. households rely exclusively on broadcast television.
Needless to say, this raised a red flag with the NAB's Dennis Wharton: "CEA has proven today it can manufacture bogus DTV numbers along with millions of soon-to-be-obsolete analog television sets. The undeniable fact is that the Government Accountability Office has testified before Congress that 21 million U.S. households rely exclusively on broadcast television, or 19% of all homes. That is more households than are located in the states of Texas, Michigan, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee and Wyoming, combined. CEA has no credibility when compared to the highly respected, non-partisan GAO."
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