A newly released report from the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) concludes that the line between linear and streaming television is becoming increasingly difficult to draw. According to the new data, close to 40% of linear audiences now access linear TV through some form of streaming, an increase of two percentage points from last year.
The latest findings from ARF’s DASH TV Universe Study, “TV Deconstructed: New Life for Linear?” offer a detailed look at how households are increasingly turning to virtual MVPDs and provider apps on connected TV sets to access linear channels.
“Linear access is being reconfigured around apps, connected devices and streaming-native services,” says Jim Meyer, General Manager of DASH. “In that sense, streamed linear is not a break from linear’s past, but an enabler of its future.”
For ARF, the shift is not merely conceptual or a simple transfer of legacy linear audiences from a set-top box to an app: streamed linear has fundamentally shifted the demographics of the linear household, which linear television no longer the primary delivery platform for such needs as cable television, direct broadcast satellite services or telecom hardware.
Among all linear viewers, 21% use vMVPDs exclusively, 14% use a combination of traditional pay TV via app and hardware, and 3% use traditional pay TV exclusively via an app. This compares to 39% using traditional pay TV via hardware and 23% relying solely on antennas.
Additionally, households accessing linear television through vMVPDs or Pay TV apps are more likely to earn higher incomes, with an index of 110 for households earning $85,000 compared to an index of 97 for traditional linear households.
When it comes to larger, co-viewing households, the study also finds that streamed linear households are more likely to be larger and include children, indexing at 108 for household sizes of 3+ and 105 for children in the home (compared to 84 and 80, respectively, for traditional linear). They are also significantly more likely to co-view content (index 115).
Lastly, the ARF finds that “Streaming Begets More Streaming,” as streamed linear households over-index in the adoption of both free and paid streaming services. For example, 41% of U.S. households that added a vMVPD in 2025 also added a paid on-demand streamer (such as Netflix, Max, or Disney+) in the same year, compared to just 32% of all U.S. households.
“The adoption of vMVPDs is part of a broader household transition toward a hybrid viewing environment that seamlessly blends live channels, paid on-demand streaming, and free streaming options,” ARF concludes. “In this hybrid landscape, streaming is no longer defined strictly by on-demand viewing, and linear is no longer bound to the cable box.”
Accredited by the Media Rating Council, the ARF DASH TV Universe Study is a nationally projectable survey conducted annually since 2021 in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago. DASH records, in granular detail, how American households connect to and consume TV across platforms, services, and devices. The study produces reliable measures and modeling signals with applications in advertising, sales, measurement, and strategy. DASH data is released to licensees twice a year in rolling, 12-month waves, with historical data available for trending.
