DTV Sales Hit Record for 2003 Jan 14, 2004

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The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) announced record digital television (DTV) unit sales for 2003. CEA also revealed that the single-month totals for December 2003 nearly surpassed that of the entire year 2000.

Factory-to-dealer DTV product sales totaled 4,102,365 units in 2003, and December 2003 sales totaled 640,443 units -- just 7,986 units under entire year 2000 sales. The highest single-month unit sales total stood at 372,215 from June 2003. The December sale high represents a 58-percent increase over June 2003.

CEA Market Research projects that 5.8 million DTV units will be sold in 2004, 8.3 million in 2005, 11.9 million in 2006, and 16.2 million in 2007.

CEA defines DTV products as integrated sets and monitors displaying active vertical scanning lines of at least 480p and, in the case of integrated sets, receiving and decoding ATSC terrestrial digital transmissions.

"2003 was a banner year for HDTV," said Gary Shapiro, CEA president and CEO. "In addition to clearing several policy hurdles, most notably the successful adoption of the cable plug-and-play agreement, we experienced a boom in product sales like never before in the analog to digital transition."

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