Julia Stoll
Research expert covering TV and video media
Television industry in the United States - statistics & facts
With the advent of on-demand services, traditional TV has seen increased competition worldwide, particularly in the United States. Consumers are gradually canceling their cable or satellite subscriptions in favor of more flexible video streaming offers, such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. The viewer share of traditional TV only more than halved between 2022 and 2024, while streaming services grew in popularity, surpassing television consumption in the early 2020s. However, the majority of people opt for a combination of both TV and video streaming content, demonstrating that they complement each other.
Streaming takes the lead in daily screen time
TV was always one of the most popular media activities in the United States. However, estimates of daily time spent with video suggest that traditional TV now accounts for roughly a third of total viewing among U.S. adults, with streaming claiming the largest share. What is more, younger people appear to devote significantly less time to watching television than their older counterparts, as alternative forms of entertainment have begun to greatly increase in popularity. In general, the total revenue of the traditional TV and home video market is projected to shrink steadily through 2030, with every segment declining.
Two out of three households have cut the cord
These falling viewership numbers do not necessarily mean that people are watching fewer TV series and movies overall, just that they are beginning to turn away from linear TV and move to on-demand services such as Netflix. Consumers in the U.S. have been particularly quick to adopt new viewing technologies. While the number of TV households in the United States has continued to grow, reaching 128 million in the 2025-26 season, the share of cord-cutters and cord-nevers climbed to roughly two-thirds of all TV households by 2025, indicating that consumers are pivoting away from traditional video sources.
Connected TV reshaping the ad playbook
One of the industry's major sources of income is advertising, a revenue stream that is forecast to drop below 50 billion U.S. dollars by the late 2020s after peaking above 70 billion U.S. dollars a decade ago. In contrast, connected TV advertising spending surpassed 33 billion U.S. dollars in 2025 and is on track to exceed 50 billion by 2029. Companies like Procter & Gamble and Abbvie still spend hundreds of millions of dollars on TV advertisements, and the country's most popular programs charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for each 30-second advertisement spot. These tactics are now under scrutiny, seeing that the market and consumers are shifting to digital media.
Overall, the U.S. television market seems to have entered a time of transition rather than decline. The screen itself is not going anywhere, but the way content reaches it is changing fast, and networks that fail to adapt to shifting consumer preferences risk losing ground to more agile competitors.
