During Comcast’s earnings call on Thursday with Wall Street analysts, executives said that 20 percent of its 25 million total customers now subscribe to HDTV. That’s a 72 percent jump over the last year.

The Comcast CFO said, "We now have 5 million, or 38%, of our digital customers taking high-definition DVR services. These customers are among our best customers and pay on average $75 or more for video services a month, a $25 premium to the digital starter customer category."

Once again, the subject of customers who bought an HDTV, but didn’t know about the requirement to subscribe to HD content came up. "It is amazing when you actually look at statistics of customers who bought high-def sets who think they’re getting high-def actually are not yet getting high-def, "Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said. "Then they finally get the real high-def and they’re really in love with the product. So new televisions just improve television, period, when they’re hooked to digital and of course eventually people realize to hook it up to the real HDTV it then becomes incredibly compelling."

When asked about plans for additional HD channels, the executives elected to focus on the quality of their HD programming instead of the quantity. This was against the background of DirecTV’s recent advertising claims of 150 HD channels "soon." Comcast recently filed a false advertising claim against DirecTV for those ads starring Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd. A U.S. District court said that Comcast failed to prove that DirecTV’s claims were false.