Comment Re:Market Isn't Even Ready (Score 1) 487
North American high-definition television sales grew about 60% to 10 million units in the fourth quarter as Samsung and Sony gained market share at the expense of Sharp and other manufacturers, NPD Group unit DisplaySearch said.
While this doesn't confirm that 25% market penetration referenced in the GP, it does point to a fairly significant level. It isn't clear from the article whether the growth is relative to the previous quarter or to the same quarter of the previous year, which would obviously make a big difference (assuming the growth has been trending). Other growth numbers in the article do explicitly compare to the previous year, but that doesn't prove anything.
What does this mean? Well, as I said, it doesn't confirm the 25% market penetration, but it might indicate a higher level of penetration than you expected.
Also, your 80 million number for America is way too high because we need to look at the number of households, not the total population. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html gives the 2000 number of households for the US as 105,480,101 and gives a population growth from 2000 to 2006 of 6.4%, which gives us an estimate for the number of household in 2006 as 112,230,827. Throw in another couple of percent to get to 2008 as a pure guess: 114,475,444.
Back to penetration -- 25% of households is 28,618,861 -- call it 29 million. With 10 million sold in the 4th quarter of 2007, and at least another 6 million in the 3rd quarter (based on the 60% growth rate), thats 17 million HDTVs in just the last half of 2007. You decide how likely the 25% penetration is given this.
Another reference, http://www.rtoonline.com/Content/article/Oct07/Nielson_HDTV_Household_DMA_Estimates7975789103007.asp, gives the US HDTV penetration as 13% at the end of last October. Even assuming that a full third of the 10 million HDTVs sold in the 3rd quarter were sold in October, that still pushes the penetration up to almost 19%. Not 25%, but in the ballpark. Of course, this over-counts those purchases a bit since some are likely purchased as upgrades or as second (or more) HDTVs for a given household.
