General · EdgepediaOctober 15, 20267 min read

The Gauge (Nielsen)

The Gauge is a monthly report from the measurement company Nielsen that divides all time Americans spend watching a television screen into broadcast, cable, streaming, and "other" categories, and reports each large streaming platform's share of that total. Nielsen introduced it in June 2021 to give the television industry a single, uniform view of how streaming compares with traditional broadcast and cable viewing, a comparison the industry had previously lacked.¹

Key fact	Detail
Publisher	Nielsen, the U.S. audience measurement company; published monthly on Nielsen's data center²
What it measures	Total broadcast, cable, and streaming consumption occurring through a television screen, reported as share of TV time for the total day, Persons 2+³
Launch	June 2021; the debut report (May 2021) put streaming at 26% of TV consumption, surpassing broadcast at 25%, with cable at 39%¹
Streaming measurement	Hardware in panel homes that tracks streaming via internet routers¹
Companion reports	The Media Distributor Gauge (added April 2024) ranks viewing by parent company; The Ad Supported Gauge (launched May 2025) reports the ad-funded share quarterly³^•⁴
Measurement calendar	Follows the broadcast calendar, with measurement weeks running Monday through Sunday³
Status caveat	Nielsen notes that The Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge do not reflect its currency TV ratings used for advertising sales⁵

What the report shows

Each month The Gauge reports the share of total television time taken by broadcast, cable, streaming, and other uses of the TV set, and breaks the streaming share into named platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+. In the debut report covering May 2021, Netflix and YouTube each held 6% of total TV time, Hulu 3%, Amazon Prime Video 2%, and Disney+ 1%; Nielsen observed that because the streaming landscape was so divided, no single service held a significant amount of viewers' time.¹

The report also tracks month-to-month movement. In July 2025, streaming edged closer to half of all TV viewing: YouTube set a platform record at 13.4% of TV, Netflix reached a record 8.8%, and The Roku Channel hit 2.8%, while broadcast held 18.4% and cable 22.2% of TV watch-time.³ Seasonal patterns are visible in the data: broadcast and cable shares typically soften over the summer when sports and original programming are light, and rise in the fall; in October 2025, NFL games drove a 4.3% monthly increase in broadcast viewing.⁶

Methodology

The Gauge combines two separately weighted panels into one chart. Streaming data comes from a subset of Nielsen's National TV panel homes fitted with Streaming Meters, hardware that observes the internet traffic passing through the home router; broadcast, cable, and total usage figures come from the full national TV panel.⁷ Nielsen had been measuring streaming since 2017, but adoption by the streaming services themselves took time; Netflix initially called Nielsen's streaming ratings inaccurate, and by the time The Gauge launched, Netflix's chief executive Reed Hastings said Nielsen was in a good place to referee how streaming was changing U.S. television.¹^•⁸

The report's FAQ addresses boundary questions, including what counts as "other" TV usage, what falls into "other streaming," where linear streaming services contribute, and how live streaming on Hulu and YouTube is handled.² Nielsen cautions that The Gauge is a public-facing snapshot rather than the currency ratings used to transact advertising, a distinction that became prominent during the 2026 methodology dispute.⁵^•⁹

Companion reports

Media Distributor Gauge. In April 2024 Nielsen expanded The Gauge to include The Media Distributor Gauge, which reports total viewing by media distributor, combining each company's broadcast, cable, streaming, and other properties into a single share.³ Nielsen has also adjusted how apps are grouped within the platform Gauge: in early 2025 it began grouping streaming apps owned by the Walt Disney Company, and with the March 2025 report it began grouping Warner Bros. Discovery's and Paramount's streaming apps together as well.¹⁰

Ad Supported Gauge. In May 2025 Nielsen launched The Ad Supported Gauge, a quarterly report on the portion of television that carries advertising across broadcast, cable, and streaming. Its first edition reported that in Q1 2025, 72.4% of TV viewing was on ad-supported platforms versus 27.6% ad-free, and that ad-supported streaming accounted for 42.4% of ad-supported TV viewing, with cable and broadcast together at about 58%.⁴

The 2026 methodology dispute

In early 2026 Nielsen began incorporating universe estimates from the DASH TV Universe Study, run by the Advertising Research Foundation with NORC at the University of Chicago and accredited by the Media Rating Council, into its Big Data + Panel currency measurement.⁷^•¹¹ When Nielsen prepared to reflect the new estimates in the February 2026 Gauge, previews showed a downturn in streaming audiences and an increase in counted broadcast and cable households, and streamers raised concerns that the new methods would see streaming measurements take a downturn.¹²

Nielsen first delayed the February report by one week to March 24, then postponed the methodology change entirely: the February Gauge was released in April on the same methodology used for January, and the DASH-based updates were pushed to the start of the fall 2026 season to minimize trend breaks.¹² Nielsen's chief client officer Peter Naylor told clients the change more accurately reflected the TV landscape and that long-term trends for broadcast, cable, and streaming would still hold.¹³ Nielsen's SVP of product strategy Brian Fuhrer attributed the perceived discrepancies to lag in the DASH survey data, which initially arrived 12 to 15 months old on average.¹¹

The adjustment was subsequently scheduled as a one-time change to The Gauge, the Media Distributor Gauge, and the Ad Supported Gauge beginning with the September 2026 measurement interval, aligning the reports with Nielsen's TV currency data; Nielsen said it would publish the September and October intervals together later in the year.¹⁴ Alongside this, Nielsen announced currency enhancements effective August 31, 2026, including passive co-viewing measurement using wrist-worn wearable devices, latency-adjusted DASH universe estimates, an improved Household Demographic Assignment Model, and integrated weighting of panel and big data.¹⁵ Nielsen has also said a publisher-fed content measurement suite planned for early 2027 will eventually inform future versions of The Gauge.¹⁶

Context

The Gauge filled a gap that had held the streaming industry back from integrating advertising: until 2021 there was no uniform, cross-platform measure of streaming consumption against linear television.¹ The report's trajectory tracks the shift it measures. In its debut month streaming held 26% of TV time; by December 2021 Nielsen reported in its SEC filings that consumers spent over a quarter of their total TV time with streaming,¹⁷ and by July 2025 streaming edged close to half of all TV viewing.³ The report has become a regular reference point for industry coverage of platform shares, even as Nielsen's broader measurement methodology remains subject to client scrutiny and Media Rating Council oversight.⁹

References

Initially written Oct 15, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 25, 2026