Streaming
Streaming's share of the TV screen keeps setting records — and YouTube leads them all
Every few months Nielsen's The Gauge — the standard monthly scorecard of how Americans split their TV time — prints a new record, and the 2025–26 stretch has been relentless. Streaming took 47.5% of all US TV viewing in December 2025, a category record, per Nielsen; on Christmas Day it hit 54% of daily TV usage, the biggest single-day share Nielsen has ever recorded. By May 2026 the monthly figure had pushed to 48.6%.
The distributor race inside that number has a clear leader: YouTube, which posted a platform-best 13.8% of all TV watch-time in May 2026 — its third straight month as the largest single distributor of television, per Nielsen and MediaPost's coverage of the Media Distributor Gauge. Netflix notched its own personal best of 9.0% in December 2025; Amazon's Prime Video (4.5%) and The Roku Channel (3.1%) both set platform records in May.
Cable's share, meanwhile, continues its structural decline — down around 4 points year over year in mid-2026 snapshots — while broadcast holds roughly flat on the strength of live sports and news.
For the industry, two implications follow. First, "streaming vs. TV" is over as a framing — streaming is TV for something close to half of all viewing. Second, the ad market's center of gravity now sits with platforms — YouTube, ad-tier SVODs, FAST services — whose inventory is bought and measured very differently than the linear grid ever was.