It’s official, people aren’t watching TV as much as they used to

New reports from Nielsen and Leichtman Research both highlight how quickly traditional TV is losing the fight to streaming, TikTok, and YouTube.

It finally happened, at least according to a new metric Nielsen began using two years ago: linear TV now accounts for less than 50 percent of all TV usage. This probably isn’t a surprise unless you’re reading this on the couch while watching the NBC Nightly News. Between YouTube, TikTok, and streaming channels, people have a lot of ways to occupy their video-viewing time.

Approximately two years ago, Nielsen started using a new metric for measuring how people spend their TV-watching time. It built in buckets for broadcast TV, cable TV, streaming, and a catchall called “Other” that accounted for people using gaming consoles and media players. The latest report shows broadcast and cable TV each dropping about one percent from June 2023 to July 2023. Streaming and the “Other” category each gained that one percent in the same time period.