Super Bowl size TVs

The broadcast of the Super Bowl will hit the airways this Sunday and many people around the nation will be watching on a new television.

According to national retail statistics, last year U.S. retailers sold 61 percent more TVs the week before the Super Bowl compared to the previous week, NPD said. Revenue from TV sales jumped 46 percent that week.

Local retailers are seeing the boom, too.

“We’re selling a lot of the new televisions,” Karen Mains, Daubendiek TV and Appliance sales representative, said. “You usually get an increase before Super Bowl.”

With the high demand for televisions, Daubendiek’s has been busy making deliveries of televisions sets to residents and ordering more into the store in time for Sunday, she said.

“The Super Bowl week is usually one of the top 10 busiest weeks of the year,” Jim Freeman, Beatrice Wal-Mart store manager, said.

In the last couple of years, television sales at the Beatrice Wal-Mart have increased steadily during this time of year, particularly because of the Super Bowl and the fact that people are beginning to get their federal and state tax refunds.

The most popular new televisions have shown to be the LCD, plasma and the DLP, Mains said. People are also paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars for televisions.

Fox is expecting to beat the record of 94.08 million viewers who watched the Dallas Cowboys beat the Pittsburgh Steelers in January 1996, according to the Nielsen Media Research. With the New England Patriots on a quest to become the first undefeated team since the 1972 Dolphins, the record for viewers may be broken this Sunday, according to the Associated Press.

Along with the draw of the Super Bowl, a lot of people are upgrading their televisions as the technology for broadcast and cable stations begin to change and offer more channels high definition.

More and more cable companies, like Charter Communications, are beginning to tap into the cable stations that provide high definition programming and making it available to its customers, Tucker Carlson, Charter Communications government public relations official, said.

“Because they’re taking advantage, we’re taking advantage of it,” he said.

Charter is making the move to provide more high definition programming to meet the demands of their customers in providing a higher quality picture, Carlson said.

“It is just continuing to meet the demands of the customer as they move forward into the future.”

Not all channels will be offered in high definition as either television networks are not switched over or the high definition channels are unavailable to Charter, Carlson said.