Report: Salt Lake unprepared for digital TV

Ready or not, here it comes — and Salt Lake City is the least-ready city in the nation for the digital TV transition coming next year.

A report released Thursday by a pair of organizations shows Salt Lake City has the highest percentage of households at risk of losing TV viewing altogether when the nation switches from TV signals being sent by stations in an analog format to signals sent digitally.

Salt Lake has 23.2 percent of its households that rely solely on free over-the-air analog broadcast TV signals.

About year from now, full-power broadcast stations will transmit in digital-only. People who subscribe to cable and satellite service or who have a digital TV with a digital tuner likely won't be affected, but people who rely strictly on free over-the-air broadcast signals captured by rooftop or rabbit-ear antennae and viewed on analog TV sets will be unable to get programming unless they obtain a set-top converter box.

"You're looking at just the sheer number of over-the-air households in Salt Lake City," Joel Kelsey, policy advocate for Consumers Union, said in a telephone news conference about the report. "Many of them are likely to be analog television sets, but I wouldn't want to crawl into the mind of every consumer in Salt Lake City. But a lot of folks choose not to have satellite or cable service for various different reasons."

Consumers Union, which produces Consumer Reports magazine, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights released the report Thursday, with data provided by the Nielsen Co.

Also a likely factor in Salt Lake's top ranking is the relatively large Hispanic population and a large percentage of elderly people on fixed incomes, said Mark Lloyd, vice president for strategic initiatives for the Leadership Conference. Latino, African-American and relatively poor households are at the greatest risk, he said. Latinos rely on Spanish-speaking television programming on low-power TV stations — which are not required to make the digital transition.

Statistics in the report show that 22 percent of Salt Lake households are Hispanic or Latino and 3.3 percent are African-American.

Thursday's report dovetails with data released last week by the Nielsen Co. that showed Salt Lake City was more unprepared for the transition than most metropolitan areas. Salt Lake ranked 54th among 56 markets for its percentage of TV sets that are unequipped for digital broadcasts.