Streaming took 48.6% of American television watch-time in May 2026, a gain of one percentage point over April, while cable slid to 20.4% and broadcast to 19.2%, according to figures Nielsen published today.

Nielsen released its May 2026 editions of The Gauge and the Media Distributor Gauge today, July 28, 2026, covering a five-week measurement interval that ran from 27 April to 31 May. The headline number is a streaming share of 48.6% of total television watch-time, up 1.0 point on April. Cable finished the month at 20.4%, broadcast at 19.2%, and the residual "other" category, which captures uses of the television set that fall outside the three named platforms, at 11.7%.

Total television usage fell between April and May, as it does every year once the broadcast season closes and outdoor activity picks up. What changed is the size of the fall. According to Nielsen, overall TV usage declined by 1% across the April-to-May transition, against declines of 2% to 4% in equivalent intervals in prior years. That shallower slope is the mechanical reason streaming's share moved up rather than sideways: the platform held its volume better than the two linear categories did.

A year of share movement, compressed into one chart

The twelve-month comparison is sharper than the month-on-month one. In May 2025, the same four buckets stood at broadcast 20.1%, cable 24.1%, streaming 44.8% and other 10.9%. Cable has therefore surrendered 3.7 points of total television watch-time in a year. Streaming has added 3.8. Broadcast has given up 0.9 points, a slower rate of erosion than cable's, which reflects the residual pull of live sport and network news on the broadcast schedule.

Within streaming, the distribution of that growth is uneven. YouTube Main accounted for 13.8% of total television watch-time in May 2026, against 12.5% in May 2025. Prime Video moved from 3.5% to 4.5% over the same twelve months. Netflix went from 7.5% to 8.0%. The Roku Channel climbed from roughly 2.5% to 3.1%. Disney streaming, which Nielsen aggregates across Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu SVOD, edged down from 5.0% to 4.9%.

That last figure is worth holding onto. It is the only one of the large streaming lines to fall year on year, and it complicates a simple reading in which every streamer gains at linear's expense.

YouTube holds the distributor lead for a third month

YouTube recorded what Nielsen described as a platform-best 13.8% of television watch-time in May, retaining the largest share of any distributor for a third consecutive month. The platform also posted the single largest monthly share gain across both streaming platforms and media companies, adding 0.4 points on April's 13.4%.

The three-month framing matters. Nielsen's March 2026 Gauge, cited in investor materials for the Fox-Roku transaction, placed YouTube at 13.2% of monthly United States television viewership. April brought 13.4%, May 13.8%. The streak is short by the standards of YouTube's earlier run at the top of the Media Distributor Gauge, which stretched across 2025, because the sequence was interrupted by the disputed February 2026 edition.

The gap between YouTube and the second-placed distributor now stands at 3.8 points. Disney held 10.0% of total watch-time in May, down from 10.7% in May 2025.

Prime Video's best month rests on one finale and twenty live events

Amazon's Prime Video reached 4.5% of television usage in May, up 0.3 points and a 4% increase in viewing volume, which Nielsen recorded as the platform's best share of television to date. Viewing among audiences aged 18 to 24 rose 18% on the platform.

Nielsen attributed the bulk of the gain to two drivers. The final episodes of the original series The Boys generated 5 billion viewing minutes and ranked as the most-watched streaming title of the month. Separately, Prime Video carried 20 live sports events in the interval, including 12 NBA Playoff games, six WNBA games and two NASCAR Cup Series races. Those events combined for 7.5 billion viewing minutes.

The sports figure exceeds the drama finale by half again, which is the more commercially significant of the two numbers. Amazon's NBA and WNBA rights run for eleven years from the 2025-26 season, and the platform carried the 2026 NBA Finals globally in June, one month after the measurement window covered here. Amazon has positioned live sport and general entertainment as a single advertising business rather than two adjacent inventory pools, a framing that the May numbers support: the sports schedule, not the scripted slate, carried the month.

Netflix, Roku and Paramount take the rest of the gains

Netflix returned to the fourth position in the Media Distributor Gauge with 8.0% of television usage, up 0.2 points. The lift came in part from the acquired series La Brea, which drew more than 4 billion viewing minutes and finished as the second most-streamed title of May.

The Roku Channel set a platform record of its own at 3.1% of total television usage, up 0.1 points. Paramount Streaming rose to 2.3%, a 0.2-point gain and a 7% increase in viewing over April, which Nielsen identified as the largest usage gain of the month among streaming platforms in percentage terms. The company credited the opening episodes of the Paramount+ original Dutton Ranch along with library content including Spongebob Squarepants.

At the distributor level the picture is more consolidated than the platform-by-platform view suggests. NBCU and Versant together held 8.4% of television viewing, up 0.2 points, with the two components split 6.2% and 2.2%. Comcast completed the Versant separation on 2 January 2026 and announced a further tax-free spin-off of NBCUniversal and Sky on 29 June 2026, so the combined line item in Nielsen's chart now spans two separately listed public companies whose inventory is still sold under a shared arrangement.

Behind them: Fox at 6.5%, Warner Bros. Discovery at 5.7%, Amazon at 4.5%, The Roku Channel at 3.1%, Scripps at 1.6%, Weigel at 1.4%, A+E at 0.9%, Hallmark at 0.8% and AMC Networks at 0.6%. Warner Bros. Discovery's 5.7% compares with 7.0% in May 2025, the steepest single-distributor decline in the table over twelve months.

NBC takes the top broadcast telecasts, ESPN the top six on cable

NBC owned the two largest broadcast telecasts of May: the Kentucky Derby, with more than 18 million viewers, and Game 7 of the NBA Western Conference Finals, with more than 12 million. ESPN's viewing was up 16%, and the network held the top six cable telecasts of the month on the back of its NBA Playoffs coverage.

Those results sit inside categories that otherwise contracted. Broadcast sports viewership rose 3%, but broadcast dramas fell 13% and sitcoms fell 10% as the season concluded in the final weeks of the interval. On cable, the NBA Playoffs steadied the sports genre without offsetting a 16% drop in cable news viewership, which is the largest single genre movement Nielsen disclosed for the month.

Cable news has been the load-bearing genre for the cable bundle's remaining reach. A 16% monthly decline in a category that anchors both audience delivery and affiliate economics is the kind of movement that shows up later in carriage negotiations and in the pricing of the categories that buy against news adjacency.

The measurement caveat attached to every number above

Nielsen appended an unusually prominent note to both reports. The Gauge and the Media Distributor Gauge do not reflect Nielsen's currency television ratings, the dataset that informs advertising sales. Both reports measure total television viewing, ad-supported and non-ad-supported alike. Nielsen made enhancements to its currency ratings in February 2026, with impact data supplied to clients in advance, and states that it is working on updates to The Gauge and the Media Distributor Gauge to reflect those currency enhancements for the Fall TV season, at which point additional back data will be provided to clients.

That paragraph is the thread connecting this month's report to the most contested measurement story of 2026. In March, the Video Advertising Bureau accused Nielsen of suppressing a February Gauge edition that would have shown linear television at 47.4% of United States viewing time against streaming's 41.9%, a reversal of January's 42.7% and 47.0% split. The February figures reflected a methodology change based on ARF demographic inputs. Analysts subsequently argued the dispute was less about methodology than about economic control of television budgets.

The unresolved part is arithmetic. The May 2026 Gauge shows streaming at 48.6% and linear at 39.6% combined. The February data at the centre of the dispute showed those positions inverted under a different demographic base. Nielsen has now committed to reconciling the two frameworks by the Fall TV season, and separately altered seven currency metricsscheduled for deployment as currency on 31 August 2026. Until that reconciliation lands, the shares published today describe total viewing rather than the tradeable audience.

Why this matters for media buyers

The numbers arrive at the close of the 2026 upfront cycle. Nielsen's 2026 Upfront Planning Guide, published on 12 March 2026 using Q4 2025 data, put streaming at 66.7% of ad-supported television time among adults aged 18 to 49 and ad-supported television at 74.2% of total viewing. The May Gauge is a total-viewing measure, not an ad-supported one, so the two figures are not interchangeable. They point in the same direction on trend while resting on different bases, and the distinction is precisely what Nielsen's own footnote flags.

Three structural developments give the May distribution added weight.

Consolidation. Fox agreed on 15 June 2026 to acquire Roku for approximately $22 billion, combining Fox's live sport and news with Tubi and The Roku Channel. On May's Media Distributor Gauge lines, Fox at 6.5% and The Roku Channel at 3.1% would place the combined entity ahead of Netflix and behind Disney. As of March 2026, Tubi and The Roku Channel together represented 5.2% of all United States streaming viewership. Meanwhile, Paramount's pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn conditions from European regulators. Two of the fifteen lines in the distributor table are candidates to merge with others.

Ad-tier scale against watch-time share. Netflix at 8.0% of watch-time is tracking toward roughly $3 billion in 2026 advertising revenue, having put its global ad-supported reach at 250 million monthly viewers at its 13 May 2026 upfront. Disney at 10.0% of watch-time reported Entertainment SVOD operating income up 88% year on year in its second fiscal quarter and has been consolidating EMEA campaigns onto its global ad server. Peacock, at 1.8% of total television watch-time, recorded its first quarterly profit at $189 million. Watch-time share and monetisation are diverging: the ranking of distributors by minutes is not the ranking by advertising revenue, and buyers working from Gauge shares alone will misread the second from the first.

Verification. Confidence in CTV delivery data remains a live problem. Research published in July 2026 found 43% of CTV buyers uncertain about where their advertisements actually ran. A monthly panel-plus-big-data share report does not resolve campaign-level placement questions, and was never designed to.

The five-week interval

One technical detail affects comparisons. The May 2026 measurement period spanned five weeks, from 27 April through 31 May, because Nielsen reports on the broadcast calendar with weeks beginning on Monday. Five-week intervals raise absolute viewing totals relative to four-week months without necessarily moving shares, since every platform is measured across the same window. Where a five-week month can distort a share is at the edges: a schedule concentrated in the final week of a broadcast season, such as the drama and sitcom finales that drove the 13% and 10% declines noted above, lands inside a five-week window and outside a four-week one. Any comparison of May 2026 against a four-week month carries that asymmetry.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Nielsen, the audience measurement company, publishing The Gauge and the Media Distributor Gauge. The distributors measured include YouTube, Disney, NBCU and Versant, Netflix, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, The Roku Channel, Scripps, Weigel, A+E, Hallmark and AMC Networks.

What: Streaming reached 48.6% of total United States television watch-time in May 2026, up 1.0 point on April, while cable fell to 20.4% and broadcast to 19.2%. YouTube took 13.8% of watch-time, its largest share recorded and the biggest monthly gain of any distributor at 0.4 points. Prime Video reached a platform-best 4.5%, Netflix 8.0%, The Roku Channel a record 3.1% and Paramount Streaming 2.3%. Overall television usage declined 1% from April, against 2% to 4% in prior April-to-May transitions.

When: The measurement interval spanned five weeks, from 27 April 2026 through 31 May 2026. Nielsen published the reports on 28 July 2026.

Where: The United States television market, covering broadcast, cable, streaming and other uses of the television screen, measured through the Nielsen National TV Panel plus Streaming Platform Ratings.

Why: Prime Video's gain was driven by the final episodes of The Boys, which generated 5 billion viewing minutes, and by 20 live sports events including 12 NBA Playoff games that together drew 7.5 billion viewing minutes. Netflix was lifted by the acquired series La Brea at more than 4 billion minutes, and Paramount by the new original Dutton Ranchalongside library titles. Broadcast and cable declines followed the close of the broadcast season, with dramas down 13%, sitcoms down 10% and cable news down 16%. Nielsen notes that neither report reflects the currency ratings used for advertising sales, and that updates aligning both with currency enhancements are planned for the Fall TV season.