520 4 Union-News, Thursday, January 2, 2003 Fewer viewers resist non-network television fare By MATT KEMPNER Cox News Service They have only the vaguest sense of who this Tony Soprano fellow is. They've been shut out of "The Osbournes," "SportsCenter" and Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show." They don't do "Trading Spaces," or cook with Emeril, or get grossed out by surgeries on Discovery Health. They've missed all the naughtiness of "The Real World." They are Americans without cable or satellite connections. And in the last decade they've made up an ever-shrinking minority in the nation's TV landscape. Along the way they are missing or maybe avoiding an ever-widening expanse of what's on TV.
A lot that before might have appeared on over-the-air broadcast networks is now the province of cable. When Sen. Trent Lott (R- Miss.) appeared on the BET network in a last-ditch attempt to keep his majority leader post, some Americans did without because they didn't have cable or satellite. The Super Bowl is still on broadcast. but most NBA playoff games this season will be only on cable's TNT and ESPN networks.
And the bulk of the kids programming on commercial TV is now on Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network and Disney cable channels rather than on broadcast networks. More than 88 million of the nation's homes are signed onto cable or satellite TV service, according to the Federal Communications Commission. 4 That's a 2.7 percent increase in the penetration of American homes since the year earlier. That leaves less than 20 percent of American homes with TVs but without cable or satellite hookups. Compare that to 1987, when according to Nielsen Media Research, just under half the TV homes did without cable.
the only I widespread alternative to broadcast at the time. Which means people who still rely entirely on over-the-air broad- cast signals for TV are increasingly rare. "Rabbit ears? What do you need that for?" says Mark Cooper, the Consumer Federation of America's research director, summing up views by many people in the TV industry. "It's sort of like buggy whips. The industry has moved on." That thinking fueled some of the argument against a new FCC rule requiring TV makers to outfit most new sets with built-in digital tuners equipment that some say could increase the price of each set by anywhere from $15 to more than $200 though the majority of Americans can get digital service via their cable and satellite equipment.
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