WASHINGTON: One-third of the nation’s TV stations doing local news do it in high definition, according to the latest survey from the Radio Television Digital News Association and Hofstra University.
A total of 770 TV stations produce local news in the United States. About a third of them supply news to another 224 stations for a total of 986 U.S. TV stations running local news. Based on the RTNDA’s figure, nearly 330 have local news in high-definition.
“The critical distinction is market size, with two-thirds of the top 50 markets already running local news in HD and all other market sizes below one-quarter,” the survey said. “There’s no meaningful difference by geography, but ABC affiliates in the survey were a little less likely to broadcast local news in HD than other affiliates.”
RTNDA said one-fourth of the stations not already doing their news in HD planned to do so this year.
“Again, the bigger the market, the more likely they were to say yes to this year,” the survey said. “Forty percent of the news directors in top 25 markets said yes to this year if they weren’t already doing it. That dropped to 15 percent for markets 151-plus.”
-- Deborah D. McAdams
