Nielsen: linear TV made up less than 50% of all US TV use in July, a first in two years of tracking, and streaming hit a record high of 38.7% of TV use
Nielsen's monthly platform rankings show broadcast and cable making up less than half of all TV use. — Broadcast and cable networks …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nielsen’s measurements show a sustained reweighting of TV viewing: streaming represented 19% of TV time in 2020, then overtook cable and broadcast individually in July 2022. July’s result extends that trajectory by putting the combined linear categories below half of viewing.
The milestone matters because it shifts the comparison from streaming versus a single legacy distribution channel to streaming versus the traditional TV bundle as a whole. Later Nielsen coverage would show streaming exceeding cable and broadcast combined over a full month, reinforcing that this was part of a continuing transition rather than an isolated platform win.
First-order effects
- Streaming services gain a larger share of the audience time that broadcasters and cable networks historically controlled, while linear TV’s combined share falls below the majority threshold.
- Nielsen’s monthly platform rankings become a more consequential benchmark for networks, streamers, and advertisers assessing where TV attention is moving.
Second-order effects
- Broadcasters and cable operators face greater pressure to use streaming outlets to retain viewers and to defend the value of linear advertising and carriage businesses.
- Advertisers and media buyers have a stronger incentive to compare linear and streaming reach in one planning framework as viewing becomes less concentrated in the traditional bundle.
Third-order effects
- If the share shift persists, TV competition will be organized less around broadcast-versus-cable rankings and more around the economics and measurement of cross-platform viewing.
- The durable industry change is fragmentation: audience attention moves across multiple streaming services, making reliable comparable measurement increasingly central to allocating programming and advertising budgets.
The trend: This is one data point in TV viewing’s migration from a bundled linear system toward a streaming-led, cross-platform audience market.