Haye, who lost his WBA belt in July 2011 to Ukrainian Vladimir Klitschko before beating Dereck Chisora 12 months later, faces Charr who has won all but one of his 24 professional bouts.

His only defeat came against Klitschko's older brother Vitaly last September when the Ukrainian retained his WBC title when the referee stopped the contest in the fourth round after Charr sustained a deep cut above his right eye.

Haye, who wants one of the Klitschko brothers to give him a world title shot, has a professional record of 26 wins and two defeats.

"(Haye) is determined to add another world title to his collection and sees his June 29 opponent as the next step towards doing just that," Haye's promoters said in a statement.(Reporting by Sonia Oxley; Editing by Mark Meadows)

Roth co-wrote, produced and stars in the horror film opening Friday about a group of people who are in a Chilean nightclub when a massive earthquake strikes, resulting in deadly chaos. It is inspired by real events that occurred after the South American country was hit by a magnitude 8.8 quake in 2010.

Roth has directed, produced and appeared in his share of big-budget films including "The Man with the Iron Fists,""Inglourious Basterds" and his "Hostel" series, but in an interview Wednesday, he said he and co-writer/director Nicolas Lopez set out to make "Aftershock" in a different manner. Roth said they decided, "instead of doing a $40 million movie, let's do this as a $2 million movie and see what we can do."

They opted not to film in Hollywood but rather in Chile, where not many big movies are shot. "So they're not thinking about how to do stuff. They're figuring it out. They don't know that you need 10 people to do this job, so two people do it," Roth said.

"Aftershock" was filmed with inexpensive SLR cameras fitted with very good lenses. Roth said the result was footage that looks just like what you see in a "Spider-Man" movie and that audiences couldn't tell the difference. "You just need to know how to light, you need to know how to shoot, but the future is here and you don't need all the bells and whistles that Hollywood thinks they need," he said.

Roth noted that even the biggest blockbusters are in theaters for only weeks before they're released on video. "So instead of spending $40 million in advertising, hoping it makes 80 million," ''Aftershock" is being released in theaters, iTunes and Video On Demand on the same day with minimal advertising, he said.

He predicted that if this "everywhere release" works with "Aftershock," others will follow, allowing them to get their films out to a targeted audience without the backing or the budget of a big studio and still turning a profit.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Stephen Hawking toured a stem cell laboratory Tuesday where scientists are studying ways to slow the progression of Lou Gehrig's disease, a neurological disorder that has left the British cosmologist almost completely paralyzed.

After the visit, the 71-year-old Hawking urged doctors, nurses and staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to support the research.

Hawking recalled how he became depressed when he was diagnosed with the disease 50 years ago and initially didn't see a point in finishing his doctorate. But his attitude changed when his condition didn't progress quickly and he was able to concentrate on his studies.

"Every new day became a bonus," he told a packed room.

Cedars-Sinai received nearly $18 million last year from California's taxpayer-funded stem cell institute to study the debilitating disease also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS attacks nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control the muscles. People gradually have more and more trouble breathing and moving as muscles weaken and waste away.

There's no cure and no way to reverse the disease's progression. Few people with ALS live longer than a decade.

Diagnosed at age 21 while a student at Cambridge University, Hawking has survived longer than most. He receives around-the-clock care, can only communicate by twitching his cheek, and relies on a computer mounted to his wheelchair to convey his thoughts in a distinctive robotic monotone.

A Cedars-Sinai patient who was Hawking's former student spurred doctors to invite the physicist to glimpse their stem cell work.

"We decided it was a great opportunity for him to see the labs and for us to speak to one of the preeminent scientists in the world," said Dr. Robert Baloh, who heads the hospital's ALS program.

During the tour, Hawking viewed microscopic stem cells through a projector screen and asked questions about the research, Baloh said.

Cedar-Sinai scientists have focused on engineering stem cells to make a protein in hopes of preventing nerve cells from dying. The experiment so far has been done in rats. Baloh said he hopes to get governmental approval to test it in humans, which would be needed before any therapy can be approved.

Renowned for his work on black holes and the origins of the universe, Hawking is famous for bringing esoteric physics concepts to the masses through his best-selling books including "A Brief History of Time," which sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Hawking titled his speech to Cedars-Sinai employees "A Brief History of Mine."

Despite his diagnosis, Hawking has remained active. In 2007, he floated like an astronaut on an aircraft that creates weightlessness by making parabolic dives.

Space exploration is important "for the future of humanity," he told the audience.

Hawking said he did not think Earthlings would survive "without escaping beyond your fragile planet."

And he gave some advice: Look up at the stars. Stay curious.

"However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at," he said.

Doctors don't know why some people with Lou Gehrig's disease fare better than others. Baloh said he has treated patients who lived for 10 years or more.

"But 50 years is unusual, to say the least," he said.

___

Follow Alicia Chang at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) will be released in May. Yahoo is featuring first-person stories from Americans who are diagnosed with some of the most common mental health disorders in the United States. Here's one story.

FIRST PERSON | When I was 16, smoking pot and drinking cases of beer were my medication for ADHD -- although I didn't know that's what I had at the time. From what I could tell, ADHD diagnostics didn't commonly exist when I was in high school.

All my friends drank beer and smoked pot. Here in the desert of Midland, Texas, there's practically nothing to do but drink and hit house parties. In school, I could not sit in class and could not understand my assignments, and when there was too much distraction, my mind floated away. I was a straight-A student until I started missing class, and I had high anxiety after that. Throughout my early 20s and 30s, this chaos impacted my work, friends and relationships.

I attended treatment facilities and psychiatric hospitals. Each would make a fresh diagnosis: alcoholism, substance abuse, schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. I was baffled as to my condition and in turmoil over what would be diagnosed next. When I was 35, after three stints in mental institutions and four in drug rehabilitation centers, I was diagnosed as an adult with ADHD.

I went to a neurologist in Midland, and he asked several questions and included my drug problem and alcohol abuse. He asked if I heard of ADHD. I thought this was a child's problem, I informed him. He gave me a new prescription of Adderall. Finally, at 44, I was sober and taking my medication as prescribed. Since then, I haven't drank or done drugs.

Now at 50, my whole view of life is different. I had to start my life anew, but now, financially and mentally, I'm OK, and I think my life will remain stable. I had to learn how to cope with my new life. I am able to collect my thoughts, and my anxieties are few. My religious belief is strong. My faith in God and prayer is a daily habit for me. (My religious beliefs in God have been with me since childhood, but faith alone in the early years was unlikely to overcome addiction.)

I do understand that I am taking chances with Adderall, which is addictive. But my spiritual recovery is how I live. The medicine is just an aid to help.

NEW YORK (AP) -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said she wants to be called just "Sonia from the Bronx."

And on Sunday, the first Hispanic justice on the nation's highest court explained why, saying "you can't come from the world I grew up in, the South Bronx, without feeling the frenzy of exile, constantly."

She spoke at Cooper Union, a private college in Manhattan's East Village where Abraham Lincoln once gave a speech against slavery.

The justice said she wasn't "doing press" on an evening in her hometown that ended with hugs from some members of the audience who asked her to sign their copies of her memoir, "My Beloved World."The best-selling book was published earlier this year with what she called Sunday "some baring of my own heart."

She spoke on the closing night of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York City, which included her conversation with scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

It was hardly a private event.

With a wry smile, Sotomayor said she recognized that "it seems pointless today to exclude the press from any event, when any member of the audience can tweet quotations."

This year's festival has focused on looking at the idea of bravery in art and politics.

The judge's speech came as she and fellow Supreme Court justices are considering three issues dividing the nation: affirmative action, voting rights and gay marriage.

Sotomayor was careful not to reveal her personal opinions, though she conceded that "it is impossible for a homosexual couple today not to be affected by the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases in some way," adding to laughter, "just so you're all clear, I'm not predicting anything."

The federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman now being considered by the Supreme Court. The court must also rule on California's Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage.

The justice told the New York audience on Sunday that 2013 is likely to be "a turning point for those whose lives will be changed, for better or for worse, by those rulings."

Born in New York to Puerto Rican parents, Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court in 2009 by President Barack Obama and sworn in later that year.

She said she needs to keep returning to the Bronx, "to the essence of my world, with love, to take strength from."

Sotomayor said that while the streets of her childhood South Bronx were portrayed as "ugly, dirty, crime- and drug-ridden" in movies, she wrote about "the hopes and struggles of the people," about "a beloved world for someone like me."

Facebook, which reported first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, has more than 1 billion people logging in each month. It's a rapid growth for a service that began in a Harvard dorm room less than nine years ago.

Here are some key developments over the years:

February 2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University.

March 2004: Facebook begins expansion to other colleges and universities.

June 2004: Facebook moves headquarters to Palo Alto, Calif.

September 2004: Facebook introduces the Wall, which allows people to write personal musings and other tidbits on profile pages. Lawsuit filed against Facebook claiming that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from a company co-founded by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a third person at Harvard.

September 2005: Facebook expands to include high schools.

May 2006: Facebook introduces work networks, allowing people with a corporate email address to join.

September 2006: Facebook begins letting anyone over 13 join. It also introduces News Feed, which collects friends' Wall posts in one place. Although that led to complaints about privacy, News Feed becomes one of Facebook's most popular features.

May 2007: Facebook launches Platform, a system for letting outside programmers develop tools for sharing photos, taking quizzes and playing games. The system creates a Facebook economy and allows companies such as game maker Zynga Inc. to thrive.

October 2007: Facebook agrees to sell a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft for $240 million and forges advertising partnership.

November 2007: Facebook unveils its Beacon program, a feature that broadcasts people's activities on dozens of outside sites. Yet another privacy backlash leads Facebook to give people more control over Beacon, before Facebook ultimately scraps it as part of a legal settlement.

March 2008: Facebook hires Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer, snatching the savvy, high-profile executive from Google Inc.

April 2008: Facebook Chat introduced.

February 2009: Facebook introduces "Like," allowing people to endorse other people's posts.

June 2009: Facebook surpasses News Corp.'s Myspace as the leading online social network in the U.S.

August 2010: Facebook launches location feature, allowing people to share where they are with their friends and strangers.

October 2010: "The Social Network," a movie about Zuckerberg and the legal battles over Facebook's founding, is released. It gets eight Academy Awards nominations and wins three.

June 2011: Google launches rival social network called Plus. The Winklevoss twins end their legal battle over the idea behind Facebook. They had settled with Facebook for $65 million in 2008, but later sought more money.

September 2011: Facebook introduces Timeline, a new version of the profile page. It shows highlights from a person's entire Facebook life rather than recent posts.

November 2011: Facebook agrees to settle federal charges that it violated users' privacy by getting people to share more information than they agreed to when they signed up to the site. As part of a settlement, Facebook will allow independent auditors to review its privacy practices for two years. It also agrees to get approval from users before changing how the company handles their data.

December 2011: Facebook completes its move to Menlo Park, Calif. Its address is 1 Hacker Way.

January 2012: Facebook begins making Timeline mandatory.

February 2012: Facebook files for an initial public offering of stock. A few weeks later, it unveils new advertising opportunities for brands, allowing messages from them to mix in with Facebook status updates and photos.

April 2012: Facebook announces plans to buy Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, for $1 billion in cash and stock. It also discloses it plans to list its stock on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "FB."

May 2012: Facebook sets a price range of $28 to $35 for its IPO, then increases it to $34 to $38. On May 17, Facebook prices its IPO at $38 per share, and the stock begins trading the next day. The following week, the stock price starts dropping amid concerns about Facebook's ability to keep growing revenue and sell ads on mobile devices.

That month, Facebook also updates its policy to give users more clarity on how information they share is used by the company. The company also signals that it may start showing people ads on websites other than Facebook. Other companies already do this. How would that work? Users who click on an ad on Facebook.com could see the advertised product pop up in ads on other sites.

August 2012: Facebook updates its app for iPhones and iPads to make it speedier and less clunky. Government clears Facebook's Instagram deal.

September 2012: Facebook closes on Instagram deal, whose value has dropped to about $740 million, with Facebook's falling stock price. Unlike many other acquisitions, Facebook has promised to keep it going, rather than shut it down. Facebook plans to use Instagram's dozen or so employees to help improve Facebook's own mobile applications.

October 2012: Facebook says it has 1 billion active users.

December 2012: Facebook rolls out a messaging app called "Poke" to lukewarm reviews.

January 2013: Facebook unveils a search feature that lets users quickly sift through their social connections for information about people, interests, photos and places.

March 2013: Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg publishes book urging women to take leadership roles.

April 2013: Facebook unveils a new experience for Android phones. The idea behind the new Home service is to bring content right to you, on the phone's home screen, rather than require you to check apps on the device.

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway's sovereign wealth fund is looking into selling off shares in oil firms that work in Equatorial Guinea, where oil revenue does nothing to relieve abject poverty, the fund's ethics council said, a list that includes Exxon Mobil.

The Norwegian Pension Fund Global was Exxon Mobil's tenth-largest shareholder at end-2012 with some 16 billion crowns worth of shares, or a stake of 0.81 percent.

The fund, whose investments totalled $725 billion on Wednesday, invests Norway's revenues from oil and gas production for future generations. Exxon Mobil was its tenth-largest equity holding at end-2012, according to its annual report.

"We are looking into the oil companies in which we hold shares and which are active in Equatorial Guinea," Ola Mestad, the head of the fund's ethics council, said on Wednesday.

"The production of the country's dominant natural resource appears to enrich only the country's elite while the living conditions of the population are amongst the worst in the world," the council said in its annual report.

The fund has frequently excluded companies for what it deems to be unethical behaviour based on the recommendations of its ethics council.

Mestad declined to name the specific companies being considered in the case of Equatorial Guinea or say how long the process could take.

EXXON, MARATHON, HESS

A spokeswoman for Exxon Mobil in Norway confirmed the company was active in Equatorial Guinea and that statements she had made to a local daily newspaper were correct.

"To operate honestly and ethically is one of the most important things that we do," spokeswoman Kristin Kragseth was cited as saying by the Aftenposten on Wednesday.

"Regardless of where we are in the world, it is important to us to maintain high ethical standards, follow rules and regulations and respects local culture. We do that in Equatorial Guinea as we do in Norway and all the other countries we operate in."

Kragseth did not immediately respond to requests for further comment, and U.S. Exxon officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

U.S. energy companies Marathon Oil and Hess Corp also operate fields in Equatorial Guinea. The oil fund owned 0.76 percent of Marathon Oil and 0.69 percent of Hess at the end of 2012, according to Reuters data.

Officials at both Marathon Oil and Hess could not immediately be reached for comment.

Equatorial Guinea is nominally one of Africa's richest countries with a GDP per capita of more than $27,000 per year, according to the World Bank, putting it ahead of Portugal and just below Spain. Even so, much of the 720,000 population lives in deep poverty.

The country was ranked among "the worst of the worst" civil liberty abusers in a 2012 survey by democracy group Freedom House. President Teodor Obiang Nguema has been in power in the tiny central African state for more than three decades, and his son is wanted in both the United States and France on corruption charges.

The Norwegian fund's ethics council makes its recommendations to Norway's finance ministry, which has ultimate responsibility for the fund.

The fund last excluded The Babcock & Wilcox Co. and Jacobs Engineering Group Plc in January, citing their involvement in the production of nuclear weapons.

Obama also will use his three-day trip, which begins Thursday and includes a stop in Costa Rica, to highlight the immigration overhaul moving through Capitol Hill, both for an audience in Latin America and for those back home in the U.S.

The president is scheduled to arrive Thursday afternoon in Mexico City for meetings with President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Since taking office in December, Pena Nieto has moved to end Mexico's widespread access it gave U.S. security agencies helping fight drug trafficking and organized crime. The changes mark a dramatic shift from the policies of Pena Nieto's predecessor, Felipe Calderon, who was lauded by the U.S. for boosting cooperation between the two countries as he led an aggressive attack on Mexico's drug cartels. Calderon's war on the cartels was unpopular in Mexico and left much of the country's north close to a state of war.

The White House has tried to downplay a potential rift, with officials emphasizing Mexico has kept the U.S. informed about the changes. Obama on Tuesday said he would wait to hear directly from his Mexican counterpart before assessing the changes.

Despite the intense focus on security issues, Obama advisers say the president will try to show that the ties between the two countries are broader than the drug wars that defined the relationship in recent years.

"Security has been so front-and-center in the public discussion of the U.S.-Mexico relationship that lost in that is the enormous commercial relationship between the two countries," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser.

Obama is expected to call for the U.S. and Mexico to deepen trade ties to promote job creation on both sides of the border. However, he is not expected to announce any major new economic initiatives.

Mexico was the second-largest export market for U.S. goods in 2011, according to the office of the U.S. trade representative. U.S. trade with Mexico totaled $500 billion in 2011.

White House aides say they also see strengthening Mexico's economy as a way to address one of the root causes of much of the illegal immigration to the U.S.

Rhodes said the U.S. expects Pena Nieto and other regional leaders to be largely supportive of the immigration overhaul being debated on Capitol Hill, which includes provisions to strengthen security at the 2,000-mile long border with Mexico.

However, Carl Meacham, a former senior Latin America adviser on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the U.S. immigration effort is viewed with "skepticism and confusion" in the region.

"They've been brought to the altar so many times by different American administrations that there's a bit of a lack of trust," said Meacham, who now works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Getting Mexico's buy-in, particularly on border security, could help Obama sell the immigration overhaul in the U.S., particularly to wary Republicans. GOP lawmakers have long insisted the U.S. must focus its efforts on securing the border before addressing the legal status of the more than 11 million immigrants in the country illegally.

The immigration bill being debated in the Senate would strengthen border security, allow tens of thousands of new high- and low-skilled workers into the country, require all employers to check their workers' legal status and provide an eventual path to citizenship for most of the immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

More than half of the immigrants in the U.S. illegally are from Mexico, according to the Pew Research Center.

Following a speech Friday to Mexican entrepreneurs, Obama will travel to Costa Rica, his first visit as president to the Central American nation. In addition to meetings with Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla, Obama will attend a gathering of leaders from the Central American Integration system. The regional network also includes the leaders of Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.

On Saturday, Obama will attend a business conference aimed at fostering economic cooperation between the U.S. and Central American nations. The president is due back in Washington Saturday night.

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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Supreme Court justices appeared divided on Monday as they considered a challenge to a law requiring non-profit organizations to adopt an anti-prostitution policy in order to obtain federal funding for HIV/AIDS programs abroad.

Several justices voiced concerns that the law imposes unconstitutional limits on freedom of speech, but others indicated the government had a right to direct how its money should be spent.

The 2003 law bars funding for non-governmental organizations that work on HIV/AIDS prevention but do not have a policy opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.

The Alliance for Open Society International and Pathfinder International - NGOs that receive funding for overseas HIV/AIDS prevention - sued in 2005, citing the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

The organizations challenging the provision do not want to take a stand on prostitution. They say the law interferes with their work providing advice and counseling to prostitutes about the risks of HIV infection.

The non-profit world is divided, with 46 groups, many of which focus on women's rights, supporting the law.

The groups obtained an injunction in 2006 that has prevented the policy from being enforced ever since.

Justice Elena Kagan is recused, most likely due to her previous role as solicitor general in the Obama administration, meaning only eight justices are presiding over the case.

At least three indicated they had concerns about the law, with Justice Samuel Alito the most outspoken.

He signaled discomfort with the general concept of the government having a broad right to direct groups it is funding on what they can and cannot say.

"It seems to me like quite a dangerous proposition," he said. Alito questioned whether, for example, the government could impose similar conditions to funding for higher education.

FIRST AMENDMENT QUESTIONS

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg focused on a move made by the Bush administration, later amended by the Obama administration, to resolve some of the First Amendment questions. The government has said that NGOs could set up affiliate groups to receive the funding without the parent organization having to announce a position on prostitution.

Ginsburg said that approach may not solve the problem because it's "no simple thing" for an NGO to set up a new organization in another country. She said that requiring this extra step is "quite an arduous" burden to place on NGOs.

Taking another line of attack, Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether the law restricted an NGO's ability to "stay true to its own beliefs."

Other justices, while not wholeheartedly endorsing the government's argument in defense of the law, did not appear to feel that there was a problem in general with Congress attaching conditions on funding.

Justice Stephen Breyer said there were "dozens and dozens" of examples in which the government gave funding to groups because they shared the same goals. "Otherwise, they wouldn't be in the program," he said.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the government is "just picking out who is an appropriate partner."

Under a barrage of questioning from the justices, David Bowker, the NGOs' attorney, seemed momentarily stumped by one of Roberts' questions.

The chief justice asked whether, during the period in which South Africa was racially segregated, the U.S. government could have limited funding for public health programs to NGOs that were opposed to the policy, known as apartheid.

After a lengthy pause, Bowker conceded the question was tougher than the one posed in his case, but that it would still be impermissible for the government to make decisions on that basis.

The case is Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-19.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Howard Goller and Bill Trott)

A growing number of them have stopped paying for cable and satellite TV service, and don't even use an antenna to get free signals over the air. These people are watching shows and movies on the Internet, sometimes via cellphone connections. Last month, the Nielsen Co. started labeling people in this group "Zero TV" households, because they fall outside the traditional definition of a TV home. There are 5 million of these residences in the U.S., up from 2 million in 2007.

Winning back the Zero TV crowd will be one of the many issues broadcasters discuss at their national meeting, called the NAB Show, taking place this week in Las Vegas.

While show creators and networks make money from this group's viewing habits through deals with online video providers and from advertising on their own websites and apps, broadcasters only get paid when they relay such programming in traditional ways. Unless broadcasters can adapt to modern platforms, their revenue from Zero TV viewers will be zero.

"Getting broadcast programing on all the gizmos and gadgets like tablets, the backseats of cars, and laptops is hugely important," says Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters.

Although Wharton says more than 130 TV stations in the U.S. are broadcasting live TV signals to mobile devices, few people have the tools to receive them. Most cellphones require an add-on device known as a dongle, but these gadgets are just starting to be sold.

Among this elusive group of consumers is Jeremy Carsen Young, a graphic designer, who is done with traditional TV. Young has a working antenna sitting unplugged on his back porch in Roanoke, Va., and he refuses to put it on the roof.

"I don't think we'd use it enough to justify having a big eyesore on the house," the 30-year-old says.

Online video subscriptions from Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. which cost less than $15 a month combined have given him and his partner plenty to watch. They take in back episodes of AMC's "The Walking Dead" and The CW's "Supernatural," and they don't need more, he says.

He doesn't mind waiting as long as a year for the current season's episodes to appear on streaming services, even if his friends accidently blurt out spoilers in the meantime. With regular television, he might have missed the latest developments, anyway.

"By the time it gets to me to watch, I've kind of forgotten about that," he says.

For the first time, TV ratings giant Nielsen took a close look at this category of viewer in its quarterly video report released in March. It plans to measure their viewing of new TV shows starting this fall, with an eye toward incorporating the results in the formula used to calculate ad rates.

"Our commitment is to being able to measure the content wherever it is," says Dounia Turrill, Nielsen's senior vice president of insights.

The Zero TV segment is increasingly important, because the number of people signing up for traditional TV service has slowed to a standstill in the U.S.

Last year, the cable, satellite and telecoms providers added just 46,000 video customers collectively, according to research firm SNL Kagan. That is tiny when compared to the 974,000 new households created last year. While it's still 100.4 million homes, or 84.7 percent of all households, it's down from the peak of 87.3 percent in early 2010.

Nielsen's study suggests that this new group may have left traditional TV for good. While three-quarters actually have a physical TV set, only 18 percent are interested in hooking it up through a traditional pay TV subscription.

Zero TVers tend to be younger, single and without children. Nielsen's senior vice president of insights, Dounia Turrill, says part of the new monitoring regime is meant to help determine whether they'll change their behavior over time. "As these homes change life stage, what will happen to them?"

Cynthia Phelps, a 43-year-old maker of mental health apps in San Antonio, Texas, says there's nothing that will bring her back to traditional TV. She's watched TV in the past, of course, but for most of the last 10 years she's done without it.

She finds a lot of programs online to watch on her laptop for free like the TED talks educational series and every few months she gets together with friends to watch older TV shows on DVD, usually "something totally geeky," like NBC's "Chuck."

The 24-hour news channels make her anxious or depressed, and buzz about the latest hot TV shows like "Mad Men" doesn't make her feel like she's missing out. She didn't know who the Kardashian family was until she looked them up a few years ago.

"I feel absolutely no social pressure to keep up with the Joneses in that respect," she says.

For Phelps, it's less about saving money than choice. She says she'd rather spend her time productively and not get "sucked into" shows she'll regret later.

"I don't want someone else dictating the media I get every day," she says. "I want to be in charge of it. When I have a TV, I'm less in control of that."

The TV industry has a host of buzz words to describe these non-traditionalist viewers. There are "cord-cutters," who stop paying for TV completely, and make do with online video and sometimes an antenna. There are "cord-shavers," who reduce the number of channels they subscribe to, or the number of rooms pay TV is in, to save money.

Then there are the "cord-nevers," young people who move out on their own and never set up a landline phone connection or a TV subscription. They usually make do with a broadband Internet connection, a computer, a cellphone and possibly a TV set that is not hooked up the traditional way.

That's the label given to the group by Richard Schneider, the president and founder of the online retailer Antennas Direct. The site is doing great business selling antennas capable of accepting free digital signals since the nation's transition to digital over-the-air broadcasts in 2009, and is on pace to sell nearly 600,000 units this year, up from a few dozen when it started in 2003.

While the "cord-nevers" are a target market for him, the category is also troubling. More people are raised with the power of the Internet in their pocket, and don't know or care that you can pull TV signals from the air for free.

"They're more aware of Netflix than they're aware over-the-air is even available," Schneider says.

That brings us to truck driver James Weitze. The 31-year-old satisfies his video fix with an iPhone. He often sleeps in his truck, and has no apartment. To be sure, he's an extreme case who doesn't fit into Nielsen's definition of a household in the first place. But he's watching Netflix enough to keep up with shows like "Weeds," ''30 Rock," ''Arrested Development," ''Breaking Bad," ''It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and "Sons of Anarchy."

He's not opposed to TV per se, and misses some ESPN sports programs like the "X Games."

But he's so divorced from the traditional TV ecosystem it could be hard to go back. It's become easier for him to navigate his smartphone than to figure out how to use a TV set-top box and the button-laden remote control.

"I'm pretty tech savvy, but the TV industry with the cable and the television and the boxes, you don't know how to use their equipment," he says. "I try to go over to my grandma's place and teach her how to do it. I can't even figure it out myself."