Three in four US TV viewers now use smartphones while watching

The rise of simultaneous screen usage forces a shift from a linear viewing model to an integrated multi-screen strategy. For streaming platforms, this means the primary competition is no longer just rival services, but the short-form video feeds occupying the viewer's hand. This fragmentation complicates traditional advertising metrics, as the big screen may provide the audio backdrop while the smartphone captures the visual focus. As older demographics adopt these habits, the industry must move toward cross-platform experiences that treat mobile and TV as a single environment. Watch for broadcasters to integrate more interactive mobile features or vertical video formats into their primary streaming apps to reclaim lost engagement.

Omdia's research on simultaneous screen use sits within a broader industry push to understand and monetize fragmented attention. María Rúa Aguete, Omdia's senior director of media and entertainment, has been tracking the convergence of mobile and TV consumption patterns across multiple markets, and her IBC 2026 presentation positioned the 75% figure as evidence that the traditional single-screen viewing model has become obsolete for content strategists planning engagement and retention. The finding aligns with a growing body of data from measurement firms showing that co-viewing with a phone is now the default behavior rather than the exception, particularly among subscribers of ad-supported streaming tiers who are more likely to interact with second-screen commerce and social feeds during programming breaks.

The advertising and measurement implications are significant for streaming platforms that rely on impression-based pricing. As US TV viewer smartphone use climbs, advertisers face a structural challenge: a viewer's eyes may be on a phone while the TV delivers audio, meaning traditional viewability metrics overstate actual attention. Nielsen's cross-platform measurement initiatives have attempted to address this gap by incorporating mobile device data into TV audience estimates, though the methodology remains contested among agencies. Meanwhile, streaming platforms including Netflix and Peacock have begun experimenting with interactive mobile overlays and scale interactive video AI formats that explicitly acknowledge the second screen rather than competing against it, signaling a strategic pivot from attention capture to attention integration.

From a technical infrastructure standpoint, the shift toward multi-screen consumption is driving demand for synchronized content delivery and low-latency streaming across devices. Ericsson's Intelligent Automation Platform has been deployed across more than 15 live network environments to optimize traffic routing for simultaneous video and data sessions, a capability that becomes increasingly relevant as operators manage the bandwidth requirements of households running multiple concurrent streams. Nokia has similarly announced agentic AI capabilities for its mobile core network that reduce call setup times from roughly 10 seconds to one or two seconds, improvements that support the seamless handoff between devices that multi-screen viewers now expect. These network-level optimizations are becoming a prerequisite for the kind of integrated mobile-plus-TV experiences that Omdia's data suggests viewers already demand.