HDTV Forecast for 2009
A new report from Informa Telecoms & Media provides that the 44 million households around the world will have high-definition television at the end of the year 2008, was 4% of households worldwide.
This is a significant increase from the end of 2007, when only 2% of the television households HD.
The increase is partly due to a decrease in the cost of the HD-TV sets and decoders in the past two years.
Global HD absorption should continue to rise, helped by the introduction of services by HD free-to-air channels.
Nearly 180 million households are expected to be watching HD programming by 2012, which represents approximately 16% of TV households in the world.
HD is particularly popular in North America where the standard television relatively poor quality video and audio data.
In 2012, Informa expects 179 million households HD workers, or about 16% of TV households worldwide.
However, the overall distribution is very uneven, with Canada and the United States have more than 70% share in 2012, Japan 58%, Korea 39%, and in all other countries, less than 30%.
Informa Telecoms & Media is known in the World Report on HDTV forecasts 3rd Edition.