Nielsen has announced today that for the first time since 1992, the amount of U.S. households with a TV set has fallen.

The 2012 Advance/Preliminary TV Household Universe Estimate (UE) fell to 114.7 million, from 115.9 a year ago.

Furthermore, Nielsen says U.S. homes with a TV set is now at 96.7 percent, down from its peak of 98.9 percent.

The company claims the 2012 UE drop can be attributed to:

Digital Transition: The summer of 2009 marked a significant milestone with a shift from analog to digital broadcasting. Following the transition, consumers were only able to view digital broadcasts via a set with a built-in digital tuner (i.e., a newer TV set) or an analog TV set connected to a digital-to-analog converter box, cable or satellite. TV penetration first dipped after this transition; the permanence of this trend was acknowledged in 2010 after the number of TV households did not rebound over time.

Economics: As with previous periods of belt-tightening, the cost of owning a TV is a factor in this UE decline; TV penetration first saw sustained decreases in second quarter 2009. Lower-income, rural homes were particularly affected.

Multiple Platforms: Nielsen data demonstrates that consumers are viewing more video content across all platforms—rather than replacing one medium with another. However, a small subset of younger, urban consumers are going without paid TV subscriptions. Long-term effects of this are unclear, as it's undetermined if this is also an economic issue, with these individuals entering the TV marketplace once they have the means, or the beginning of a larger shift to viewing online and on mobile devices.

Says the company: "The media marketplace continues to evolve and become more complex. Some consumers are clearly being driven by the economy to make choices on the media devices they purchase. Others are expanding their equipment to add more audio/video devices to their home. Still others may be deferring a TV purchase or replacing their TV with a computer. Nielsen's cross-platform media strategy will allow us to measure all of this content and report the total picture of video consumption to our clients regardless of delivery method. As the census data shows that we are a more diverse country, our measurements evolve to reflect our diversity and also to encompass all the ways that Americans consume media."

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After being in advanced talks for a few weeks now, it appears Twitter will acquire the popular TweetDeck client, for somewhere around $50 million.

The claims come via Crunch who says the announcement should be made this week.

As arguably the best Twitter client around (and accounting for 13 percent of all tweets sent on a daily basis), TweetDeck is a hot commodity for the microblogging platform and remains the top app for "power users," those who tweet many times per day from many different devices.

TweetDeck also allows users to connect their LinkedIn and Facebook platforms to one app.

TweetDeck had been previously linked to UberMedia, who was looking to purchase the client for $30 million and had an exclusive negotiating window that ran out. Uber has the top Twitter app for BlackBerry (UberSocial) and the "highest rated" Twitter app for Android, Twidroyd and has been allegedly cooking up a plan for a "Twitter killing" service so on Twitter's end, the new purchase makes perfect sense.

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Eldar Murtazin, the well-connected Russian analyst and tech writer has said today that Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 sales are "catastrophic."

Earlier this year, the software company reported it had shipped 1.5 million phones, well above estimates.

Murtzain says, however, that only 674,000 of those have actually been purchased by consumers, while the rest sit on carrier's shelves.

Additionally, the writer says that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop will retire at the end of 2012, after he completes the transition of Windows Phone.

Windows Phone 7, alongside mixed critical reviews, has been plagued by botched firmware updates, some of which even left users with bricked devices.

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Gartner has posted the latest worldwide OS market share figures, and it seems that as the economy recovered, so did OS sales.

For 2010, revenue jumped to $30.4 billion from $28.1 in 2009.

Microsoft gained share for Windows, but Mac OSX remained the fastest growing segment of the market.

The server market grew 5.7 percent, as well.

Of course, the Mac OSX numbers are a bit skewed because it still represents a minuscule portion of the market, says the research firm.

IBM AIX and HP-UX saw single-digit growth year-over-year. Oracle got the biggest bump, after purchasing Sun Microsystems and getting Solaris with it.

Chart:

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