Barron’s has an interesting article on the battle to control the semiconductor content in the digital television sets. Bill Alpert, who writes the story outlines why Intel and Texas Instruments are ready to duke it out in the DTV business.

bq. That boosts the semiconductor content of a digital TV from about $110 — comparable to a cable set-top box — to the $400-$500 per unit range of a personal computer. Unit sales of TVs in the U.S. surpassed 30 million in 2002, so it’s clearly worth the attention of TI and Intel.

He makes an impressive argument but fails to mention the fact that the average selling price of a television set is around $450 these days. DTV sets have to fall to that level before we can see massive adoption rates he talks about.