NEW YORK—The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) has proposed a new framework that would reclassify how U.S. households connect to TV. It would replace the pay TV/broadband-only/over-the-air scheme the TV industry has relied on for years.
ARF pointed to data from its DASH TV Universe Study, including the first wave of DASH 2024, that underscores the continued mainstreaming of streaming television, the “appification” of pay TV and the erosion of broadband-only (BBO) penetration as a useful definition of TV connection. The findings and recommended framework are summarized in a new ARF report highlighting shifts in U.S. television usage.
According to the report, the penetration of paid AVOD services has “exploded” over the past two years, from 17% in 2022 to 63% in the spring of 2024, with the two largest streaming services, Netflix and Prime Video, accounting for the vast majority of the most recent gain.
SVOD penetration, however, has fallen over the same period, though not at the same rate. The report also highlighted how free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) continues to grow, while penetration of virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) like YouTube TV or Hulu + Live TV is flattening out. Adoption of vMVPDs has picked up among older (55-plus) households, though, suggesting that the technology is mainstreaming, according to ARF.
The report also found that more than 40% of pay TV households use apps to receive all or some of their TV signals, “blurring and effectively outmoding the concept of BBO (Broadband Only),” ARF said.
In response to these trends, ARF recommended a new classification system for U.S. TV households.
This framework divides households into six segments based on which TV signals they receive. Four of these segments constitute the pay-TV universe, including traditional and virtual providers, representing 59% of TV-accessible households this past spring. The other two segments capture households relying on over-the-air (OTA) and digital-only signals. Notably, the pay-TV segments and OTA comprise the linear TV universe, which ARF says represented 74% of U.S. TV households in spring 2024.
ARF’s proposal reflects the nonprofit organization’s long-held position on revising what it views as outdated methods of TV audience measurement, based not only on what platform viewers are watching content, but on what device as well.
“The latest trend data from DASH underscores the need for an updated view of how TV is defined and consumed,” ARF Chief Research Officer Paul Donato said. “As the lines between traditional pay and streaming services continue to blur, we’re moving toward a new paradigm that will more accurately represent how households connect to television.”
