The Gauge is Nielsen's monthly scorecard for how Americans actually watch television, and its December 2025 edition delivered the starkest number yet: streaming platforms captured 47.5% of total TV usage, a record, while broadcast and cable split roughly 41.6% between them. The figure is not a ratings chart for a single show. It is a macro-level accounting of where viewing minutes go across an entire category, and it has become the industry's preferred way of arguing about its own decline.
What is The Gauge, exactly?
The Gauge is a monthly report from Nielsen that sorts total U.S. television usage into four buckets: broadcast, cable, streaming, and "other." It launched in 2021 as Nielsen's answer to a simple problem — the company had spent decades measuring individual channels and programs, but no single tool showed how much of the day's viewing went to any one delivery method versus the rest. According to Nielsen's own methodology page, the report is built as a macroanalysis of "how U.S. audiences spend their time watching TV across platforms and media distributors," not a ranking of individual titles.
How does Nielsen actually measure it?
The Gauge stitches together two separately weighted panels. Linear viewing — broadcast and cable — comes from Nielsen's National TV panel, the same household sample the company has used for ratings for years. Streaming comes from a subset of those households enrolled in Nielsen's Streaming Meter program. Both feed into a Live+7 window, meaning a household's viewing counts if it happens live or any time within seven days of original airing or release. The result is not a survey or a self-reported estimate; it is meter data, aggregated and weighted to represent the national television population.
What counts as "streaming," and what doesn't?
This is where the category gets messy, and where most misreadings of the monthly number start. Nielsen's streaming bucket captures high-bandwidth video platforms — the Netflixes, the Prime Videos, the ad-supported apps — but explicitly excludes so-called linear streaming apps, the kind that simulate a broadcast channel inside an app. Anything Nielsen can't classify falls into "other": unmeasured sources, unidentified video-on-demand, audio streaming through a TV screen, gaming, disc playback. As of June 2023, Nielsen began using its Streaming Content Ratings data to reclassify original streaming-platform content that viewers watched through a cable set-top box, crediting that viewing to streaming instead of dumping it into "other." That single methodology change quietly moved the topline number in streaming's favor, a reminder that the Gauge's category lines are drawn by Nielsen, not by how a viewer would describe their own night.
Why did December 2025 break records?
Holiday viewing concentrates attention the way almost nothing else in the calendar does, and December 2025 showed it clearly. Streaming's 47.5% share for the month was itself a record, but the standout day was Christmas: streaming hit 54% of total TV usage and 55.1 billion viewing minutes, both category highs, according to Nielsen's report on the month. Two titles did most of the pulling. Netflix's "Stranger Things" logged more than 15 billion viewing minutes for the month, and Paramount+'s "Landman" added 6.2 billion — enough that Netflix, Prime Video, the Roku Channel, and Paramount's streaming service each notched their best individual monthly share on record. None of that would move the needle much in an ordinary month; stacked into the same four weeks as a holiday break, it was enough to reset the record.
Where does the "other" bucket fit in, and why does it matter?
The fourth category is easy to skip past, but it does real work. "Other" absorbs everything Nielsen's panel can register as television-screen activity without being able to sort it cleanly: gaming consoles, DVD and disc playback, audio streamed through a connected TV, and video-on-demand content Nielsen can't yet identify by title or platform. At the Gauge's 2021 launch, that bucket alone held roughly 10% of total usage — larger than streaming was at the time. Every methodology tweak since, including the 2023 change that moved set-top-box streaming viewing out of "other" and into "streaming," has shrunk the unclassified pile and, not coincidentally, made streaming's own number look larger. None of that is a scandal. It's how a measurement company handles a moving target — but it means a year-over-year comparison of the Gauge's streaming share is partly a comparison of two different accounting rules, not just two different audiences.
Why does the industry care about a viewing-share number?
Because the Gauge answers a question that individual show ratings can't: whether the overall pie is shifting, and how fast. When Nielsen first rolled the tool out, in June 2021, streaming held 26% of usage against broadcast's 25% — the first month streaming edged out one of the legacy categories on its own, with cable still commanding 39%. Nielsen's Brian Fuhrer called it a moment when "the past year has categorically shifted the television viewing landscape," as the Hollywood Reporter reported at the time, while Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings framed Nielsen's new role as being positioned "to referee or score-keep how streaming is changing the U.S. television landscape." Four and a half years later, streaming's share has nearly doubled, and the comparison point isn't one legacy category anymore — it's broadcast and cable combined, and streaming still came out ahead in December 2025's tally.
That trajectory is the real substance behind every ad-sales pitch, every affiliate renegotiation, and every programming executive's argument for why a given show belongs on a streaming platform rather than a network schedule. It's also, increasingly, an argument networks make about themselves: broadcast's 21.4% share in December 2025 is a data point a network can use to justify a straight-to-streaming order just as easily as a streamer can use it to justify a marketing budget. The Gauge doesn't say which shows are good, and it isn't built to. It says, with meter-level precision and its own set of category rules, where the audience's minutes already went — which is exactly the number every side of the negotiating table wants to hold before the next one starts.
For a related production perspective, read How Nielsen Actually Measures What America Is Streaming.