More than 90 percent of the homes in the United States are at least partially ready for the coming digital TV conversion, according to a new study from The Nielsen Company.
The study found that only 9.4 percent of households are "completely unready" for the DTV transition, meaning that they don't have any TV sets connected to cable, satellite or a digital converter box, and that they don't have any sets with built-in digital tuners. Another 12.6 percent of homes were deemed "partially unready," meaning they have one TV set that was ready and one or more that isn't.
Hartford/New Haven, Conn., was found to be the most prepared market, with only 3.1 percent of households deemed "completely unready." Milwaukee was found the least prepared, with 18.3 percent of households completely unready. The Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point market was better than average, with 8.5 percent of households completely unready for the transition.
The national average shows improvement from February, when just over 10 percent of households nationwide were completely unready.
"It's a slow reduction, but at least it's a steady reduction," said a spokeswoman at Nielsen. The company will continue releasing its findings each month between now and February, when the digital conversion takes place.
As Maxwell Smart used to say, "Missed it by that much!"
Local brothers Gregg and Ben Hiller were finalists in the YouTube Get Smart contest, but they didn't win the grand prize, a trip to Hollywood to the premiere of the new Get Smart movie.
"They didn't tell us how the voting turned out," said Gregg Hiller. "It was a good experience. It was lots of fun. We enjoyed promoting it almost as much as we did filming it." They set up a Web site to encourage people to vote for their video.
But the winner was "Count Von Siegfried," who took his name from a recurring villain in the original TV series who also appears in the movie. He did an exceptionally good impersonation of Don Adams, the star of the original series, and wore snazzy red silk pajamas with "86" (Maxwell Smart's secret agent I.D. number) emblazoned on them.
"His was really well done, so no complaints, really," Hiller said.
The brothers will probably enter some more YouTube contests in the next few months, he said.
Toshiba lost the high-definition DVD format war in February, when it pulled the plug on the HD-DVD and stopped competing against the Blu-ray player. But Toshiba may be trying to get back in the high-def game with another type of digital-disc player.
Recent reports in Japan say that Toshiba is working on a new type of DVD player that would play discs in a high-definition format. These discs could also be played in current DVD players, but would look better played on the new machine. The machine would also be able to play standard DVDs at near-HD quality, making them better than the "up-converting" feature available on many current DVD players.
"The modified DVD format relies on a newly-developed, large-scale integrated circuit chip to rapidly convert the stored video, but no technical details were released," according to a report at tech news site vnunet.com. "The new enhanced DVD players will be sold at lower prices than Blu-ray players, according to the sources."
Then again, HD-DVD was also sold at lower prices than Blu-ray players, and we all know how that format war turned out.
Cable channel G4 (128 on Time Warner's digital tier) is making some of its shows available for download on the Xbox Live Video Store.
The shows initially offered are Code Monkeys, a raunchy animated comedy about video-game designers in the 1980s, done in a style that imitates the look of an Atari 2600 video game; Attack of the Show, a roundup of tech and gaming news; and The Block, a snowboarder reality series.
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.
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