Ofcom today released some commissioned research concerning the shopping experience for high definition televisions. It appears as if Ofcom’s goal was to see whether or not consumers are being misled with respect to the availability of / equipment needed for actual HD viewing.

It’s always good to see Ofcom focus on the consumer experience.

– At the outset, the first thing a young person would tell you is that the research has a significant gap in coverage and focus. Ofcom omit consideration of video gaming and the associated HD console systems like PS3 and Xbox 360. Video games are now routinely sold in HD format — most of the top sellers on Amazon.co.uk are high def titles. And U.K. Xbox 360 users, while they cannot download a variety of HD movies, television programmes and sports as they can in America, nevertheless can download some HD content at this time. More HD content will likely become available over the Xbox 360 platform in the U.K. on December 4th, when Microsoft updates its platform.

Surely some percentage of shoppers are purchasing a television that will primarily be used for video games?

– Otherwise Ofcom’s research is fairly informative, but not very remarkable. Ofcom found that — in a minority of cases — mystery shoppers were given inaccurate information about their ability to watch HDTV programming. This was true in about 4-21% of all cases. It probably means that buying a television is not any more or less likely to be a confusing experience than car or jewelry shopping … basically some significant percentage of consumers are going to be misled or confused.

– Ofcom again appear to average ordinal variables in Figure 5.1.

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Overall a good effort on Ofcom’s part, but I’d like to see some aggressive mystery shopping with respect to broadband!!