After climbing by 1.2 million homes last year, the number of TV homes in the US has grown by just 0.3 million this year, reaching 119.9 million for the upcoming season, according to Nielsen’s latest TV Universe estimates. Some 305.4 million Americans aged 2 and older live in those TV homes, up 0.3% from last year.
Increases have been observed in the number of US Hispanic, black and Asian TV households once again, resulting from estimated increases in population growth.
These races and ethnicities have very different TV viewing patterns, though, with African-American adults watching almost 3 times more traditional TV per day than Asian-American adults, and almost twice as much as Asian-American adults.
Nielsen defines a TV household as one that “must have at least one operable TV/monitor with the ability to deliver video via traditional means of antennae, cable set-top-box or satellite receiver and/or with a broadband connection.”
This year, 95.9% of US homes with TVs receive traditional TV signals and/or a broadband connection, down from 96.5% last year.
Broadband connections are becoming more prevalent: not only is the broadband subscriber market itself growing, but the number of TV-connected devices has reportedly tripled since 2010.
Meanwhile, a recent study from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) indicated that the TV set is still the device with the broadest penetration in the US, reaching 96% of US homes. In fact, for the first time the three tech products with the widest penetration in US homes are screen products, with TVs being followed by smartphones (89%) and laptops (72%).
The TV set remains the top device for video viewing, according to an in-depth MarketingCharts report, although that doesn’t mean that people are defaulting to live TV. Instead, for the first time this year, research found that people are more likely to first turn to an on-demand source of video content than to live TV.
