More People Have Netflix Than a DVR

In news that's not likely to sit well with pay TV companies, the number of households with Netflix now surpasses those with a DVR for the first time ever, a new study finds.

The survey of 1,211 households throughout the United States, conducted by Leichtman Research Group (LRG), revealed that more than half of adults — 54 percent — have Netflix in their household. That's right, if you don't have Netflix, you're now in the minority. Meanwhile, 53 percent of households have a DVR.

That's a huge change from 2011, when 44 percent of households had a DVR and just 28 percent had Netflix. This is LRG's fifteenth annual study on this topic, and the first time more than half of adults reported having the popular streaming service..

The survey, conducted by telephone in January, found that 64 percent of households get a subscription video on-demand (VOD) service like Netflix, Amazon Video, or Hulu. Fifty-one percent stream any of these services on a monthly basis and 23 percent stream Netflix daily.

"On-Demand and time shifting TV services like DVR, VOD, and Netflix have permanently changed the way that people can watch TV," Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for LRG, said in a statement. "Yet traditional TV viewing still exists. For example, 46 percent of adults agree that they often flip through channels to see what's on TV."

All in all, 82 percent of households have a DVR, get Netflix, or use VOD from a cable or telecom provider. Thirty percent of households use two of those services and 14 percent use all three.

Pay TV providers are not unaware of the Netflix creep. In December 2014, Dish Network was the first major US provider to integrate Netflix into its set-top box. Comcast did the same in November after launching its own streaming service in 2015.