Cable vs. Streaming Market Share 2026: How U.S. TV Viewing Time Splits Across Every Platform

Streaming now accounts for 48.6% of all U.S. television screen time, which is more than cable and broadcast combined, according to Nielsen's The Gauge for May 2026, released July 28, 2026. Cable holds 20.4% and over-the-air broadcast holds 19.2%. Streaming first passed the combined linear total in May 2025 and has held the lead since. This guide breaks down current share by category and by platform, the five-year trend, why cable is losing ground, and what is still holding it together.

Cable vs. Streaming Market Share: Quick Answer

Streaming is the dominant U.S. television medium by total screen time, and the gap is widening.

1. Streaming (SVOD + FAST + free video): 48.6% of total U.S. TV screen time — an all-time high
2. Traditional cable TV: 20.4%
3. Over-the-air broadcast TV: 19.2%
4. Combined linear TV (cable + broadcast): 39.6% — 9 points behind streaming
5. Other (gaming, physical media, unmeasured tuning): roughly 11.8%
6. Largest single distributor: YouTube, at 13.8% of all TV screen time
7. Milestone: May 2025 was the first month streaming exceeded broadcast and cable combined

All figures are from Nielsen's The Gauge, May 2026 interval (April 27–May 31, 2026), which measures viewing on a television screen.

Key Takeaways: Cable vs. Streaming Market Share

1. The relevant comparison is no longer cable vs. streaming. It is streaming vs. all of linear TV; a threshold streaming first crossed in May 2025 and has held every month since. The margin is seasonal, though: it reached 9 points in May 2026 but narrowed to 0.2 points in February 2026, when Super Bowl LX and the Winter Olympics pulled audiences back to linear.
2. YouTube, a free platform, is the largest distributor on American television screens. Its 13.8% share in May 2026 was a platform best and its third consecutive month leading all distributors, which is ahead of Disney's entire portfolio (10.0%) and Netflix (8.0%).
3. Cable's decline is now visible on balance sheets, not just Nielsen charts. Comcast completed the Versant spin-off of its cable networks in January 2026 and announced in June 2026 that it will separate NBCUniversal and Sky as well.
4. The regional sports moat is collapsing faster than most coverage assumes. FanDuel Sports Network (the largest RSN portfolio in the country) wound down operations in May 2026, displacing local rights for roughly 13 NBA and 6 NHL teams.
5. Free streaming is doing much of the damage. Tubi and The Roku Channel alone accounted for 5.4% of all U.S. TV time in May 2026, more than most individual broadcast networks.
6. Money is following attention, slowly. Global linear TV ad spend is projected to fall more than 11% in 2026 while connected TV grows, but linear still commands the majority of TV ad dollars.

The Benchmark: Cable vs. Streaming vs. Broadcast

Streaming holds 48.6% of U.S. TV screen time, cable holds 20.4%, and broadcast holds 19.2%, per Nielsen's May 2026 Gauge.

Source: Nielsen The Gauge, May 2026 and May 2025 intervals. "Other" is calculated as the remainder. Nielsen notes that The Gauge reflects total TV viewing, not its advertising currency ratings, and that the report will be updated to reflect currency enhancements ahead of the fall 2026 season.

The Combined Linear Collapse

Media analysis has traditionally treated cable TV and broadcast TV (both of which are forms of linear TV - Traditional television broadcast on a fixed schedule) as separate categories. As far as viewers are concerned, they are the same product: fixed-schedule programming delivered through a channel grid. Measured that way, the picture is stark.

In May 2021, when The Gauge launched, cable held 39% of TV time, broadcast held 25%, and streaming held 26%; linear led streaming by 38 points. Five years later, streaming leads combined linear by roughly 9 points. Cable alone has lost close to half its share of the television day.

Platform-by-Platform Viewing Share

YouTube holds the largest single-platform share of U.S. TV screen time at 13.8%, ahead of Netflix at 8.0% and Disney's streaming services at 4.9%.

Source: Nielsen The Gauge, May 2026, as reported by Cord Cutters News and Nielsen's own release. Individual shares may not sum exactly to 48.6% due to rounding.

An important distinction: Nielsen publishes two views. The Gauge above measures streaming platforms. The Media Distributor Gauge measures total viewing per parent company across streaming, cable, and broadcast, where Disney sat at 10.0% and NBCUniversal plus Versant at 8.4%. Disney's 10.0% includes ABC and ESPN, not just Disney+ and Hulu. Comparing a distributor figure against a streaming platform figure produces misleading conclusions.

The YouTube Angle

YouTube's lead over Netflix is not marginal. It is roughly 5.8 percentage points ahead and the platform is free. This changes what "streaming won" means. The winning model on TV screens is ad-supported and, in YouTube's case, largely creator-produced. Nielsen counts YouTube's main platform separately from YouTube TV, its paid live TV service; linear streaming through vMVPD (virtual multichannel video programming distributor) apps like YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV is excluded from the streaming category and credited to broadcast or cable instead. YouTube's 13.8% is just the free platform.

The Five-Year Trend: How Fast the Shift Happened

Cable went from the dominant U.S. viewing medium to roughly half its former share in five years.

Sources: Nielsen, May 2021 Gauge launch; Nielsen, July 2022; Nielsen, May 2025 milestone; Nielsen, May 2026.

The Pace of Decline

Cable has lost roughly 19 points of viewing share since May 2021, or about 3.7 points a year. Broadcast lost roughly 6 points over the same span, a far gentler slope, because local news and network sports remain in demand. Nielsen's own four-year comparison found streaming usage up 71% while broadcast fell 21% and cable fell 39%.

Subscriber data tracks the viewing data. U.S. pay TV providers lost about 2.03 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2026, and notably, virtual MVPDs like YouTube TV, Sling TV, and Fubo shed a record 948,000 customers in that same quarter — nearly as many as traditional bundlers. The bundle is contracting whether it is delivered by coax cable or by an app. For a broader perspective, see our U.S. cable subscriber statistics.

Why Cable Is Losing Market Share

Three structural forces are driving the decline: cost, the migration of live content, and the deliberate corporate unwinding of cable assets.

Factor 1: The Cost Gap

Deloitte's 20th annual Digital Media Trends survey found the average U.S. household spends $69 per month across roughly four streaming services, which is flat year over year. In the prior edition, cable and satellite subscribers reported paying about $125 per month.

It's a significant gap, but it narrows for households that rebuild the full cable experience. Adding a live TV streaming service pushes a comprehensive streaming stack into cable's price territory, which is why some cord-cutters have returned to traditional TV. Cable's real pricing problem is transparency rather than the advertised cost: broadcast TV surcharges, regional sports fees, and equipment rental routinely add $30 to $50 to an advertised price, as detailed in our breakdown of hidden fees on your cable bill.

Streaming has its own limits. Deloitte found 73% of consumers are frustrated by continued price increases, and 61% would cancel their favorite service over a $5 monthly hike, while 68% of SVOD (subscription video on demand) subscribers now carry at least one ad-supported tier, up from 46% in 2024. The industry is converging on the ad-supported model that broadcast TV invented.

Factor 2: Live Content Migrating to Streaming

Live rights were cable's structural advantage. That advantage has been dismantled deal by deal over the years:

1. NFL Thursday Night Football — exclusive to Amazon Prime Video since 2022
2. NFL Sunday Ticket — moved from DirecTV to YouTube TV in 2023
3. NBA — the league's 11-year, roughly $76 billion agreements with Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon began with the 2025–26 season, ending a four-decade Turner/TNT relationship. Nielsen credited Prime Video's May 2026 platform record partly to its coverage of 12 NBA playoff games.
4. Broadcast TV, not cable, is the other winner. Under the new NBA deal, approximately 75 regular-season games per year air on broadcast television, up from a minimum of 15 under the previous agreement.

Factor 3: Corporate Unbundling

These are not distress sales by weak players. They are deliberate decisions by the largest media companies in the world to separate cable from everything they intend to grow.

1. Comcast completed the Versant spin-off on January 2, 2026, moving USA Network, CNBC, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), E!, Syfy, Oxygen, and Golf Channel into a separate public company. Versant shares fell 13% on their first day of trading, a blunt market verdict on standalone cable networks. In June 2026, Comcast went further, announcing it will also spin off NBCUniversal and Sky into a new publicly traded company.
2. Paramount Skydance's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, valued at roughly $110.9 billion, cleared shareholders in April 2026 and received European Commission approval on July 22, 2026. It remains contested: attorneys general from 12 states sued to block the merger in July 2026, and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order delaying the close.

What Is Keeping Cable Alive, and Why It's in Jeopardy

Live sports and live news are the two categories still holding cable's remaining households. Both are eroding, and one is eroding much faster than once thought.

Sports: The RSN Model Is Ending, Not Merely Weakening

National sports still drive cable subscriptions. Nielsen reported that ESPN was up 16% in May 2026 and owned the top six cable telecasts of the month. Live sports also remain the most-cited reason households keep a pay TV subscription, and viewers are not enthusiastic about the migration: a March 2026 Fox News national poll found that 72% of sports fans think major sporting events should be required to stay on free broadcast television rather than behind streaming paywalls.

Local sports is a different story. Regional sports networks (RSN), long the single hardest content gap to fill after cutting the cord, are being dismantled. Main Street Sports Group wound down FanDuel Sports Network in May 2026 after missing rights payments, leaving roughly 13 NBA teams and 6 NHL teams without a local broadcast home ahead of the 2026–27 seasons. All nine affiliated MLB clubs had already exited, with most moving to MLB's league-run in-market streaming and channel operation.

For years the advice was to check whether your team's RSN is available on streaming before you cancel cable. In 2026, the question is whether your team's games are on cable at all. They are increasingly on a league app, a team-owned service, or a local over-the-air station. Our guides to live TV streaming services and TV packages for sports fans cover current coverage by provider.

News: A Real but Volatile Anchor

Cable news spikes hard during elections and major events, and it lacks a widely adopted streaming substitute; most live cable news still requires a cable or vMVPD subscription. But it's not stable. Nielsen attributed cable's May 2026 decline in part to a 16% drop in cable news viewership, which the NBA playoffs could not offset. Meanwhile local broadcast news, the most-watched local news source in the country, is free over the air.

FAST: The Free Segment Reshaping the Market

Free ad-supported television (FAST) has become a structural part of the viewing day rather than a budget fallback. Tubi (2.3%) and The Roku Channel (3.1%) together accounted for roughly 5.4% of all U.S. TV screen time in May 2026, with Pluto TV's contribution reported inside Paramount's combined streaming share rather than separately. For scale, Nielsen noted in May 2025 that Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Tubi combined for 5.7% of total TV viewing, more than any individual broadcast network that month.

Where that viewing comes from is less settled than it is often reported. Nielsen's Gauge measures share, not substitution, and survey research suggests FAST is additive rather than a straight transfer out of cable. Hub Entertainment Research found that 60% of FAST users treat it as a complement to their paid subscriptions rather than a replacement, and Xumo's FAST research found pay-TV subscribers watch FAST at a slightly higher rate (47%) than cord-cutters (46%) and well above cord-nevers (35%). A Roku and Horizon Media study of 90 million households did find FAST functioning as a cable substitute specifically among cord-cutters, with 64% of U.S. Roku households now watching FAST channels.

FAST platforms replace the cable experience for households that have already left, while adding hours for households that haven't.

The user base rivals paid platforms. Parks Associates' May 2026 rankings found Tubi the most-used FAST service in U.S. broadband homes, with The Roku Channel around 60 million monthly viewers and Pluto TV near 50 million; 46% of U.S. internet households regularly use FAST services for long-form video. eMarketer projects 131.4 million U.S. FAST users in 2026, or 54% of all connected TV users.

Why this matters: FAST delivers a channel-grid, lean-back experience at zero cost. For price-sensitive households, it is the closest functional replacement for basic cable that exists. And it is free.

Connected TV Advertising: Where Cable's Ad Revenue Is Going

Viewing share and ad share have not converged yet, and that lag is the last thing propping up cable economics.

Linear television still captures the majority of TV ad dollars despite minority viewing. But the direction is unambiguous: eMarketer reports that linear TV ad spending will drop more than 11% in 2026 to $139.1 billion globally, with linear's share of global media spend down to 12.4% from 41.3% in 2013, while CTV spend rises 3.6% to $44.7 billion. Per eMarketer data cited by StackAdapt, CTV captured 20.2% of time spent with media in 2025 but only 7.7% of total ad spend.

The Versant spin-off is this dynamic expressed as corporate structure: Comcast separated a declining cable advertising business from the broadband and streaming assets it wants investors to value differently.

The Shift Is Structural, Not Cyclical 

The cable vs. streaming question is settled at the viewership level. What is still playing out is the corporate and economic aftermath: spin-offs, mergers under litigation, an RSN model dissolving mid-season, and an advertising market that has not yet evolved to match where audiences are.

The honest framing for a household deciding today is narrow. Cable's case now rests almost entirely on specific live programming, and in 2026, even that case got weaker because the local sports networks that justified the bill for millions of sports households are shutting down rather than migrating.

Before you decide, check what is actually available at your address. Pricing, channel lineups, and local sports carriage vary enormously by market. Compare cable and streaming options at your address with CableCompare to see current pricing and real availability in your area — and see our full streaming vs. cable comparison for a cost-by-cost breakdown.