EDITED and revised Wednesday, Aug. 29:

Here's one piece of market information we didn't have earlier.

The total number of households in the Spokane DMA (designated market area) is about 430,000.

If the SNL Kagan number is correct, there are 351,656 homes that subscribe either to cable or satellite in this market.

That's 82 percent of all homes. The remainder either don't want to watch TV or rely on over-the-air signals, or have cut the cable and use web based systems, like Netflix or Hulu.

Updated subscriber numbers.

Earlier today OfficeHours posted the old December 2010 numbers relating to how many subscribers DirecTV has in the Spokane TV market. We went out today looking for the latest numbers. The market is the entire eastern Washington area over to the mountains, and also includes portions of Idaho and Oregon.

SNL Kagan, a media tracking company, provided the most recent update (numbers from 2Q 2012):

                   2010 subscribers                  2012 subscribers

Comcast:         100,000                                 107,034

DISH:               102,000                                 103,318

DIRECTV:           69,000                                  75,700

Total market area number of paid programming subscribers: 351,656.

What amazes us is that the three main providers gained paid subscribers in the past two years.

In a down economy, that's a bit of a surprise.

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