Nielsen released their estimates today of what percentage HDTVs occupy in the market, based on their latest quarterly samples.

According to their findings, only 13.7% of TV households in the U.S. have HDTV capability. Only 82.5% of those households are actually utilizing the high definition capabilities of their TVs, whether due to disinterest or lack of availability. The city with the highest percentage of installed HDTVs was Los Angeles, where high definition televisions accounted for 20.4% of all television households.

This illustrates the problem that Blu Ray and HD DVD face in supplanting DVD as the de facto optical media standard. In addition to the low percentage of high definition households at this time, the number of Blu Ray and/or HD DVD households is significantly lower. Recently the HD DVD release of Transformers made waves when it sold 190,000 copies in it's first week of release. Contrast that to 8.3 million copies flying out retailer's doors on DVD, HD DVD accounted for a paltry 2% of disc sales.