Fewer than one-third of Americans are watching television exclusively through streaming platforms, with most U.S. households still watching live TV through a combination of traditional platforms like broadcast, cable and satellite, according to fresh data shared by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF).
The data is based on television use through the current mid-year, and is part of ARF’s latest DASH data set. According to ARF, 30.5 percent of American homes are digital-only — they exclusively use streaming apps to watch TV, with no antenna for broadcast TV and no subscription pay TV service like cable, satellite or a streaming cable-like equivalent.
The biggest takeaway from the DASH study is, despite industry hype over streaming, traditional linear TV still has a place in nearly 70 percent of American homes, likely due to strong interest in premium sports programming that is often not available on free streaming platforms.
Antennas are making a slow comeback, according to ARF, with 17.1 percent of Americans acknowledging using one to receive free broadcast TV channels. That figure is up 1 percentage point compared to a similar study conducted last year.
Many Americans who have antennas also watch premium entertainment programming over subscription and free, ad-supported streaming services, with practically no one relying on broadcast TV as their sole means of entertainment and information (except perhaps for those who are incarcerated).
Still, just because Americans are using a mixture of services at any given time doesn’t mean traditional linear platforms are their first or main choice for programming. ARF cautions that linear and pay TV networks are still struggling to attract an audience outside news and sports programming — which means Americans who are installing antennas are likely doing so only to watch live events that they cannot easily obtain over streaming.
“Consistent with trends over the past few years, linear and pay TV penetration in general continued to show declines in (mid-year) 2026, although the declines appeared to slow,” ARF said in the DASH study.
The DASH study uses ARF’s proprietary connection framework, but the organization said the data are also designed to support other measurement approaches. ARF said DASH produces agnostic, bottom-up measures that allow licensees to populate their own connection frameworks and build customized universe estimates based on their business needs.
That flexibility is important for advertisers, programmers, station groups and measurement companies trying to assess how audiences receive video as the legacy distinction between pay TV, broadcast and streaming continues to blur, ARF said.
DASH is conducted in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago and uses a national probability sample to produce projections across the total U.S. market. Some of ARF’s data has been incorporated into Nielsen Big Data + Panels reports; the measurement company attempted to integrate ARF DASH data into its monthly snapshot of streaming and traditional TV called “The Gauge,” but it backtracked after some clients protested the move.
