Nielsen: 36% of US households subscribe to Netflix, 13% to Amazon Prime, 6.5% to Hulu Plus; traditional TV time falls almost 10% in second half of 2014
Nielsen Charts Reach of Video Streaming — About two in five American households now subscribe to a video streaming service like Netflix …
Context & Ripple Effects
In March 2015 Nielsen put hard numbers on what had been anecdote: 36% of US households paid for Netflix, 13% for Amazon Prime, and just 6.5% for Hulu Plus, while traditional TV viewing time fell nearly 10% in the second half of 2014. It was the first time the ratings firm treated streaming subscriptions as a headline metric rather than a footnote to its core business.
That measurement gap became the story's own sequel: Nielsen later built The Gauge, a router-based panel of ~14,000 homes designed specifically to track streaming, which is the instrument behind the milestones that followed — streaming at 19% of US TV watching by early 2020 and streaming overtaking cable and broadcast outright in July 2022.
First-order effects
- Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu Plus get their first comparable household-reach benchmarks from Nielsen, giving them ammunition with advertisers while broadcast and cable networks confront a measured double-digit drop in traditional viewing time.
Second-order effects
- Nielsen's own methodology comes under pressure — subscription counts say little about actual minutes watched, forcing the company toward router-based measurement (The Gauge) to stay relevant as ad dollars follow attention.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory holds, streaming becomes the majority of US television — which it did in mid-2022 — and the market fragments: Netflix's grip on the most-watched shows erodes from over 80% in 2021 to roughly half by 2025 as Amazon, Apple, HBO, Hulu, and Paramount+ place their own shows in the Top 10.
The trend: US television is migrating from bundled channel subscriptions to per-service streaming apps, with Nielsen's measurement evolving from counting who subscribes to measuring who actually watches.