Brian Stelter writes in the New York Times that, according to Nielsen, ownership of TVs in the U.S. has fallen for the first time in 20 years. It went from a boggling 98.9% of households down to 96.7%. That is, 3.3% of households don’t have a television. According to this U.S. Census PDF, there were an estimated 114,825,000 households in the U.S. in 2010. So, 3.3% of that number is roughly 3,789,225 households without a TV.

The Nielsen Company thinks that the drop is mostly due to two demographic groups: 1) the rural poor who are increasingly unable to afford satellite service, digital TVs, etc. and 2) young people recently out of college who have decided to “cut the cord.” Poor people – whether rural or urban – are at a distinct disadvantage in today’s TV world. In 2009, TV stations stopped broadcasting analog signals in the U.S. Inexpensive tube TVs no longer exist or can’t carry digital content. Flat-screen LCD TVs are significantly more expensive than the CRT (tube) TV sets they replaced. Cable service has also increased in price at the basic levels and increasingly people opt for more expensive “tiers” of channels. So while wages have remained stagnant, the total cost of ownership of a television has gone significantly up.

It would be interesting to compare the rise of prices in the television industry as a whole with the rise of prices in the cellular phone industry. That is, as TV ownership costs have increased, so have cell phone costs. Most cell phone companies offer smartphones as the default choice, and non-smartphone cell phones are unavailable or available in only a couple of different models. Instead of paying for voice only, one pays for voice, texts, data, and so on. There are still some low-cost options for cell phones, such as prepaid plans, but overall the cost to consumers is rising in cell phones as well.

I sold my TV four years ago and haven’t looked back. My household is part of that 3.8 million that don’t have a TV. If I guess that an average household spends $60 a month on television service, that’s about $3,000 I didn’t spend on TV in four years. That’s a worthwhile cost incentive although that wasn’t my primary motivation for getting rid of the TV. When the internet was growing, there were reports that TV viewership had decreased, but it’s been climbing in recent years. Americans are spending more time watching television, especially those over the age of 65.

In my personal experience, there is a growing third and also a fourth demographic of people who don’t own TVs. The third demographic is an urban dweller who is neither poor nor right out of college and is someone who simply chooses to do without. Cities in and of themselves can be stimulation. The bigger the city, in my anecdotal evidence, the more likely they will be without a TV. The fourth demographic not mentioned by Nielsen are religious conservatives who choose not to watch TV for moral reasons. I know people in the third demographic and consider myself part of it, and I know people in the fourth demographic as well. How big are these groups? Relatively small if you look at the big picture. Most people own a TV, but several million more people in the U.S. are learning or choosing not to live with a TV.