Report: US households using only over-the-top streaming services nearly tripled since 2013 to 14.1M but still represent just 11% of all TV households
The number of U.S. households using only over-the-top streaming services to access TV programming and movies has nearly tripled over the past five years …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 measurement lands mid-arc in the cord-cutting story the related coverage traces end to end. Back in 2015, Nielsen counted 36% of US households on Netflix and under 7% on Hulu Plus as traditional TV time was already slipping; by 2017, comScore found over half of Wi-Fi homes using at least one OTT service. The new figure converts that adoption curve into outright replacement: 14.1M households now get TV exclusively from streaming.
What keeps the number in perspective is what came after it: pure-play live-TV bundles like Sling TV and DirecTV Now were still reaching only 5% of Wi-Fi households as of mid-2018, and by 2020 the top nine streamers' combined growth had pushed average households to 3.1 stacked subscriptions rather than full cable replacement — with free over-the-air broadcast homes also growing alongside.
First-order effects
- Traditional pay-TV distributors lose their most price-sensitive subscribers first: at 11% of TV households, streaming-only homes are no longer a rounding error but a measurable churn line on every quarterly earnings call.
- Streaming services gain a defined segment — the fully converted household — whose needs (live news, sports, local channels) expose exactly where pure-play catalogs fall short of the cable bundle they replaced.
Second-order effects
- Virtual MVPDs like Sling TV and DirecTV Now become the compromise product for households that want to cut the cord without going streaming-only, competing directly against both legacy cable and the Netflix-style services that pulled viewers away.
- Broadcasters and antenna makers get a second wind: Nielsen's finding that over-the-air homes grew 48% suggests a meaningful slice of defectors recombine free broadcast with streaming rather than paying anyone for linear TV.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, pay-TV's decline stops being a subscriber story and becomes a bundling story — the 2020 data showing households averaging 3.1 subscriptions points to an industry where aggregators who assemble streaming bundles capture the margin cable operators once did.
- Measurement itself becomes contested ground: as viewing fragments across OTT, OTA, and stacked services, the Nielsen/comScore duopoly's definitions of a 'TV household' increasingly determine how ad dollars and renewal negotiations get priced.
The trend: US television is shifting from one bundled subscription per home to a fragmented stack of streaming services plus free broadcast, with cord-cutting accelerating from niche to mainstream between 2013 and 2020.